13 files changed, 63428 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/1214-0.txt b/1214-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0d90356
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1214-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9433 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1214 ***
+
+THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
+
+By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been
+a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game
+preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the
+building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something royal
+in the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the
+great glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling
+was mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great
+empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to
+anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
+related not a few herself.
+
+The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside
+in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the
+heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named
+Scatchett and dubbed “Scatch”--the gate slammed to and fro monotonously,
+giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched
+itself, a hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.
+
+One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of
+enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto,
+it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give
+light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still
+burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the
+disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a
+small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,--there were never enough to go
+round,--and on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned
+for the things of the flesh.
+
+The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with the
+slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft
+under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old
+floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled
+near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no
+impatience, however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put
+them together carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of
+the grand piano, anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from
+the stand.
+
+The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows, half
+a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano. There
+were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners and
+was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
+stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
+under her fingers.
+
+In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
+armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance
+of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could
+reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.
+
+The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that
+the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed
+the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let
+the initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had
+been made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what;
+and it revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of
+trunks. The girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and
+looked at the trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A
+door slammed down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into
+one of those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
+rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
+
+The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells,
+a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite “Arlesienne”
+ will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
+“Siegfried” will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more
+than once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of
+early rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with
+stiffened fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a
+stove, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once
+pink butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls,
+and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in
+the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves
+and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down
+the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German,
+helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one
+might practice peacefully.
+
+Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
+from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
+listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he
+shook his fist up the stone staircase.
+
+“Gott im Himmel!” he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of
+his mustache bandage, “what a people, these Americans! So much noise and
+no music!”
+
+“And mad!” grumbled his wife. “All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
+night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it.”
+
+And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going
+back to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch
+was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her
+head much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters
+had gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds
+were very low with all of them. The “Bitte zum speisen” of the little
+German maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of
+beef and carrots.
+
+Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
+never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days--a fruitcake
+from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or twice
+on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth it.
+Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and
+a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh,
+yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and
+the faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all
+had always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad--the
+expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the
+contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in
+one's mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after
+nine months of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not
+at all.
+
+Or--and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
+soul--to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
+undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony
+stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was calling
+down the hall.
+
+“Scatch,” she was shouting briskly, “where is my hairbrush?”
+
+A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
+
+“I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't you got
+a comb?”
+
+“As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the teeth
+are out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look under the bed.”
+
+Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
+
+“Here it is,” she called joyously. “And here are Harmony's bedroom
+slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!” The girl got down off the
+chair and went to the door.
+
+“Thanks, dear,” she said. “I'm coming in a minute.”
+
+She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa,
+and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the
+window the air would brighten them.
+
+Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano's
+room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her
+shabby wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were
+no footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to
+the Big Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and
+held out her hand.
+
+“Look!” she said. “Under my bed! Ten kronen!”
+
+Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and
+ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the
+dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on
+which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the
+candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.
+
+“The first for a week,” she said. “Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there
+may be another relic of my prosperous days.”
+
+But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a
+government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen
+piece.
+
+“Where is the other?” she asked in a whisper.
+
+“In my powder-box.”
+
+Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.
+
+“Every little bit,” she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, “added
+to what she's got, makes just a little bit more.”
+
+“Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it,
+it's good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without
+losing it now. I'll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New
+York--I haven't even a dollar for tips.”
+
+“New York!” said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. “If Henry meets
+me I know he will--”
+
+“Tut!” The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. “You
+and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young
+mind that money isn't the only thing Harmony is going to need? She's
+going to be alone--and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not
+like us. You have your Henry. I'm a beefy person who has a stomach, and
+I'm thankful for it. But she is different--she's got the thing that you
+are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to
+fight in a church choir instead of grand opera.”
+
+Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
+
+“Temperament?” she asked. It had always been accepted in the little
+colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser
+firmament.
+
+The Big Soprano sniffed.
+
+“If you like,” she said. “Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to
+have souls, Scatchy, dear.”
+
+This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was coming
+down the hall.
+
+“I thought, under her pillow,” she whispered. “She'll find it--”
+
+Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame
+of a candle.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having
+seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back
+alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were
+gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little
+Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry's arms about her,
+had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears
+of paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets
+were still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the
+room.
+
+Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense
+of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming
+gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place
+at best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door,
+eyes and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure
+had stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment
+the gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind
+her.
+
+The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his
+mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented
+when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early
+morning practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he
+cherished a hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was
+for her he wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day--hopefully! One
+must be ready!
+
+The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the
+five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece
+of his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a
+gesture.
+
+“Bitte, Fraulein!” he said through the bandage. “It is for me a pleasure
+to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup.”
+
+The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over
+his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to
+Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could
+not but she held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in
+his best manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the
+stone staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her
+with his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
+
+The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting
+to Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out
+into the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the
+shadows, and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.
+
+It was when--having picked up her violin in a very passion of
+loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds
+echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms--it was when she was
+ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl
+from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having
+adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the
+gifted:--
+
+DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am
+honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if
+you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this
+pleasure. Harry, you have it--the real thing, you know, whatever it
+is--and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go
+now, just when lessons would mean everything--well, you must not think
+of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or
+at least--well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by being
+careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but it may help.
+Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and it may be yours
+anyhow.
+
+“Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things about our
+leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You are so beautiful,
+Harry,--although you never let us tell you so. And Sadie says you have
+a soul and I haven't, and that souls are deadly things to have. I feel
+to-night that in urging you to stay I am taking the burden of your soul
+on me! Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you
+call a policeman. And be sure you get into a respectable pension. There
+are queer ones.
+
+“Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from
+home--you said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?--and will
+keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go
+wrong--. But perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any case, of course
+it's a loan, and you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours
+by sending it back when you get to work to make your fortune. And if you
+are doubtful at all, just remember that hopeful little mother of yours
+who sent you over to get what she had never been able to have for
+herself, and who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and
+she named you Harmony.
+
+“I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.
+
+“SCATCH.”
+
+That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson
+feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in
+the draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony
+fought her battle. And a battle it was. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had
+not known everything. There had been no insurance on her father's life;
+the little mother was penniless. A married sister would care for her,
+but what then? Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to
+take her home, and she had--the hoard under the pillow. To go back and
+teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be presented,
+as he had promised her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the
+prestige at home that that would mean, and its resulting possibility of
+fame and fortune--which?
+
+She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she could
+teach English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some of the stores
+advertised “English Spoken.” That would be something to fall back on, a
+clerkship during the day.
+
+Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the
+Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and
+comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with
+most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which
+reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather
+frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.
+
+She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet
+under her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out
+into the cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall
+and listened. She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the
+barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in
+his night attire, his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face
+upraised to the floor above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
+
+When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly.
+His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand. She eyed
+him.
+
+“So! It is the American Fraulein now!”
+
+“I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music.” He
+fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one
+eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.
+
+“She leaves to-day,” she announced, ignoring the knot.
+
+“Why? She is alone. Rosa says--”
+
+“She leaves to-day!”
+
+The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth compactness.
+The Portier jerked at it.
+
+“No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I
+last night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair
+after her! A man in the gateway!”
+
+The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage, which
+had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.
+
+“She will stay if she so desire,” he muttered furiously, and, raising
+the knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and
+sweetly up-curled, stood revealed.
+
+“She will stay!” he repeated. “And when you see men at the gate, let me
+know. She is an angel!”
+
+“And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?”
+
+This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from
+telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one's heart.
+Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day--Himmel, the girl must
+go!
+
+Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and
+expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere a tiny
+room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly
+to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not
+annoy people, that was important.
+
+She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa
+wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it
+was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city--young girls
+of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!
+
+Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she
+could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went down
+to interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the owner
+for the old house.
+
+The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He looked
+past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that the lease was
+up and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight she was not so like
+the angel, and after all she could only play the violin. The angel had
+a voice, such a voice! And besides, there was an eye at the crack of the
+door.
+
+The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a heavy heart
+that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper quarters.
+
+Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
+cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the gutters
+were frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in the mountains the
+day before and hanging from a hook before a wild-game shop, was frozen
+quite stiff. It was a pretty creature. The girl turned her eyes away. A
+young man, buying cheese and tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.
+
+“That's an American girl, isn't it?” he asked in American-German.
+
+The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him, and Rosa
+talked. When the American left the shop he knew everything of Harmony
+that Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called her “The Beautiful One.”
+ Also he was short one krone four beliers in his change, which is readily
+done when a customer is plainly thinking of a “beautiful one.”
+
+Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a stove and
+no objection to practicing. There were plenty--but the rates! The
+willow plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of making the plainest
+garments appear costly. Landladies looked at the plume and the suit and
+heard the soft swish of silk beneath, which marks only self-respect in
+the American woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their
+regular terms until poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then
+at last toward evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the
+corner of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing,
+and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for
+earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.
+
+A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the
+center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear
+higher than the other and twisted one's nose. But there was an odor
+of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many
+previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco.
+Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather faint.
+
+She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity
+of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or
+twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her
+eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a
+cheese and some tinned fish under his arm.
+
+He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.
+
+“Not ill, are you?” he asked in English, and then remembering. “Bist du
+krank?” He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity
+of the “du.”
+
+Harmony smiled faintly.
+
+“Only tired,” she said in English. “And the odor of cabbage--“.
+
+Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand.
+He whistled softly. He had recognized her.
+
+“Cabbage, of course!” he said. “The pension upstairs is full of it.
+I live there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served up with
+pork.”
+
+“I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?”
+
+He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.
+
+“So bad,” he observed, “that I keep body and soul together by buying
+strong and odorous food at the delicatessens--odorous, because only
+rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only
+thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese
+has retired defeated.”
+
+“But I don't like cheese.” In sheer relief from the loneliness of the
+day her spirits were rising.
+
+“Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I
+say--” He hesitated.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Would you--don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?”
+
+“It sounds attractive,”--uncertainly.
+
+“Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?”
+
+Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see
+this brisk young American--young, she knew by his voice, tall by his
+silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could not see his
+face, but she liked his voice.
+
+“Do you mean--with you?”
+
+“I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription.”
+
+That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
+legitimate friends in need.
+
+“I am sure it is not proper, but--”
+
+“Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for professional
+services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced to-night by the
+landlady? Come now--to the coffee-house and the Paris edition of the
+'Herald'!” But the next moment he paused and ran his hand over his chin.
+“I'm pretty disreputable,” he explained. “I have been in a clinic all
+day, and, hang it all, I'm not shaved.”
+
+“What difference does that make?”
+
+“My dear young lady,” he explained gravely, picking up the cheese and
+the tinned fish, “it makes a difference in me that I wish you to realize
+before you see me in a strong light.”
+
+He rapped at the Portier's door, with the intention of leaving his
+parcels there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his arm. A
+moment later Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a bit excited,
+and lovely with the color the adventure brought into her face. Her
+companion walked beside her, tall, slightly stooped. She essayed a
+fugitive little side-glance up at him, and meeting his eyes hastily
+averted hers.
+
+They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the girl's mind
+little Scatchett's letter.
+
+“Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you, call a
+policeman.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were
+gathered miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly
+men--uniformed officers, who made of the neighborhood coffee-house a
+sort of club, where under their breath they criticized the Government
+and retailed small regimental gossip; professors from the university,
+still wearing under the beards of middle life the fine horizontal scars
+of student days; elderly doctors from the general hospital across the
+street; even a Hofrath or two, drinking beer and reading the “Fliegende
+Blaetter” and “Simplicissimus”; and in an alcove round a billiard table
+a group of noisy Korps students. Over all a permeating odor of coffee,
+strong black coffee, made with a fig or two to give it color. It rose
+even above the blue tobacco haze and dominated the atmosphere with
+its spicy and stimulating richness. A bustle of waiters, a hum of
+conversation, the rattle of newspapers and the click of billiard
+balls--this was the coffee-house.
+
+Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony had
+been a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American integrity, in
+spite of the salon of Maria Theresa and three expensive lessons a week
+in German. Harmony knew the art galleries and the churches, which were
+free, and the opera, thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone
+of Austrian life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.
+
+Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and disappeared
+for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of the “Herald.” The
+girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the bright electric lights,
+he was not handsome, hardly good-looking. His mouth was wide, his nose
+irregular, his hair a nondescript brown,--but the mouth had humor, the
+nose character, and, thank Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that
+Harmony saw all this at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables,
+with a nod here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect--a
+tall man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall
+men are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!
+
+The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the points
+of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak to him. The
+shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly the revelation
+was an easement to the girl's nervousness. This smiling and unpressed
+individual, blithely waving aloft the Paris edition of the “Herald” and
+equally blithely ignoring the maledictions of the student from whom
+he had taken it--even Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or
+threatened him with the police.
+
+He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to
+interfere with her outlook over the room.
+
+“Warmer?” he asked.
+
+“Very much.”
+
+“Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They know me
+here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest cakes for me.
+Don't let me bother you; go on and read. See which of the smart set is
+getting a divorce--or is it always the same one? And who's President
+back home.”
+
+“I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?”
+
+“Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take back
+to America with me--one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local
+color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's wife to sit in the
+cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll grow wealthy.”
+
+“But what about the medical practice?”
+
+He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous
+promise of his mouth.
+
+“Why, it will work out perfectly,” he said whimsically. “The great
+American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the
+feeble American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office
+across the street!”
+
+After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation
+until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her
+with comfortable satisfaction.
+
+“Nod your head but don't speak,” he said. “Remember, I am prescribing,
+and there's to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or
+shall I not open the cheese?”
+
+But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something
+inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional
+swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the
+paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded
+room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on
+Harmony's lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes
+that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to
+shift his gaze.
+
+The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the
+unknown protested.
+
+“The function of a coffee-house,” he explained gravely, “is twofold.
+Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation.”
+
+“I converse very badly.”
+
+“So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that well.
+Shall I commence?”
+
+Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why choke
+over conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It was warm
+there, with the heater at her back; better than the little room with the
+sagging bed and the doors covered with wall paper. Her feet had stopped
+aching, too, She could have sat there for hours. And--why evade it?--she
+was interested. This whimsical and respectful young man with his absurd
+talk and his shabby clothes had roused her curiosity.
+
+“Please,” she assented.
+
+“Then, first of all, my name. I'm getting that over early, because it
+isn't much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don't shudder.”
+
+“Certainly I'm not shuddering.”
+
+“I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a German
+uncle of my mother's. Augustus! It's rather a mess. What shall I put on
+my professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus Byrne nobody's fooled.
+They know my wretched first name is Peter.”
+
+“Or Patrick.”
+
+“I rather like Patrick--if I thought it might pass as Patrick! Patrick
+has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that's not bad. But
+Peter!”
+
+“Do you know,” Harmony confessed half shyly, “I like Peter as a name.”
+
+“Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as Peter
+Byrne. The rest doesn't amount to much, but I want you to know it, since
+you have been good enough to accept me on faith. I'm here alone, from
+a little town in eastern Ohio; worked my way through a coeducational
+college in the West and escaped unmarried; did two years in a drygoods
+store until, by saving and working in my vacations, I got through
+medical college and tried general practice. Didn't like it--always
+wanted to do surgery. A little legacy from the German uncle, trying to
+atone for the 'Augustus,' gave me enough money to come here. I've got a
+chance with the Days--surgeons, you know--when I go back, if I can hang
+on long enough. That's all. Here's a traveler's check with my name on
+it, to vouch for the truth of this thrilling narrative. Gaze on it with
+awe; there are only a few of them left!”
+
+Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as the
+strings of her own violin, and under the even lightness of his tone she
+felt many things that met a response in her--loneliness and struggle,
+and the ever-present anxiety about money, grim determination, hope and
+fear, and even occasional despair. He was still young, but there were
+lines in his face and a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less
+frank, she would have known soon enough--the dingy little pension, the
+shabby clothes--
+
+She held out her hand.
+
+“Thank you for telling me,” she said simply. “I think I understand very
+well because--it's music with me: violin. And my friends have gone, so I
+am alone, too.”
+
+He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd without
+seeing it.
+
+“It's curious, isn't it?” he said. “Here we are, you and I, meeting
+in the center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief, both working our
+heads off for an idea that may never pan out! Why aren't you at home
+to-night, eating a civilized beefsteak and running upstairs to get ready
+for a nice young man to bring you a box of chocolates? Why am I not
+measuring out calico in Shipley & West's? Instead, we are going to
+Frau Schwarz', to listen to cold ham and scorched compote eaten in six
+different languages.”
+
+Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She was
+drawing on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the crowd.
+
+Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then,
+seeing Byrne, he waved a greeting to him. Byrne's eyes, from being
+introspective, became watchful.
+
+The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with black hair
+and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He was not alone. A
+slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic, rose when he did and threw
+away the end of a cigarette.
+
+“Why do we go so soon?” she demanded fretfully in German. “It is early
+still.”
+
+He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and eminently
+satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke the other's
+language.
+
+“Because, my beloved,” he said lightly, “you are smoking a great many
+poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to speak to
+Peter.”
+
+The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.
+
+“Who is that with Peter?”
+
+“We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a woman at
+last!”
+
+The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with a slow
+and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed him, and paused
+to apologize, to the officer's delight and her escort's irritation. And
+Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line of annoyance between his brows.
+The girl was ahead; that complicated things.
+
+When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily, with a
+word of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done. He had taken
+the little Austrian's arm and led her by the table while he was still
+greeting her. He held her in conversation in his absurd German until
+they had reached the swinging doors, while her companion followed
+helplessly. And he bowed her out, protesting his undying admiration for
+her eyes, while the florid youth alternately raged behind him and stared
+back at Harmony, interested and unconscious behind her table.
+
+The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned, unsmiling, to
+the other man.
+
+“That won't do, you know, Stewart,” he said, grave but not unfriendly.
+
+“The Kid wouldn't bite her.”
+
+“We'll not argue about it.”
+
+After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.
+
+“Certainly not,” he agreed cheerfully. “That is up to you, of course. I
+didn't know. We're looking for you to-night.”
+
+A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne, but the
+situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.
+
+“I'll be round,” he said. “I have a lecture and I may be late, but I'll
+come.”
+
+The “Kid” was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air,
+angrily flushed.
+
+“You saw!” she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand
+through her arm. “He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before
+I knew you--”
+
+“Before you knew me, little one,” he said cheerfully, “you were exactly
+what you are now.”
+
+She paused on the curb and raised her voice.
+
+“So! And what is that?”
+
+“Beautiful as the stars, only--not so remote.”
+
+In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The
+“beautiful” calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her
+suspicion.
+
+“Remote? What is that?”
+
+“I was thinking of Worthington.”
+
+The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.
+
+In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of
+soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement
+and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He
+drew his chin into the up-turned collar of his overcoat and waited, an
+absurdly patient figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided
+into a rain of tears. Then he took the girl's elbow again and led her,
+childishly weeping, into a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and
+eyes of the Alserstrasse.
+
+Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was
+closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or
+of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather
+puzzled at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation.
+He had suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller's
+narrative of Rosa's account of the disrupted colony across in the old
+lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the
+dark entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
+light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the
+emotional coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God
+save the mark!--her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted
+it: his responsibility, if you please.
+
+He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly well--enough to
+love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and
+passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them,
+or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament;
+the all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher
+than others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt
+Theater, where he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had
+known in Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking
+her own meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater
+she had worn a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.
+
+Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its years
+of coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's new resolution
+that night: this poverty adopting poverty, this youth adopting youth,
+with the altruistic purpose of saving it from itself.
+
+And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story or knew
+her name, Rosa having called her “The Beautiful One” in her narrative,
+and the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition.
+
+Back to “The Beautiful One” went Peter Byrne, and, true to his new part
+of protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and tried to look much
+older than he really was, and responsible. The result was a grimness
+that alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten proprieties.
+
+“I think I must go,” she said hurriedly, after a glance at his
+determinedly altruistic profile. “I must finish packing my things. The
+Portier has promised--”
+
+“Go! Why, you haven't even told me your name!”
+
+“Frau Schwarz will present you to-night,” primly and rising.
+
+Peter Byrne rose, too.
+
+“I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely yard
+alone after dark.”
+
+“Yard! How do you know that?”
+
+Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set on the
+heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of dissolution. It
+took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally furnished an inspiration. He
+indicated it airily.
+
+“Saw you this morning coming out--delicatessen shop across the street,”
+ he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty which the girl's
+eyes seemed somehow to compel: “That's true, but it's not all the truth.
+I was on the bus last night, and when you got off alone I--I saw you
+were an American, and that's not a good neighborhood. I took the liberty
+of following you to your gate!”
+
+He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and said so.
+And in her gratitude she made no objection to his suggestion that he see
+her safely to the old lodge and help her carry her hand-luggage and her
+violin to the pension. He paid the trifling score, and followed by many
+eyes in the room they went out into the crisp night together.
+
+At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of scrubbing
+showed that the Portier's wife was preparing for the inspection of
+possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the stairs by the light of
+a candle, and the steam of the hot water on the cold marble invested her
+like an aura. She stood aside to let them pass, and then went cumbrously
+down the stairs to where, a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other,
+the Portier was frying chops for the evening meal.
+
+“What have I said?” she demanded from the doorway. “Your angel is here.”
+
+“So!”
+
+“She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you refuse,
+because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is again here, and
+with a man!”
+
+“It is the way of the young and beautiful--there is always a man,” said
+the Portier, turning a chop.
+
+His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away,
+exasperated.
+
+“It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate,” she threw back
+over her shoulder. “I knew it from the first; but you, great booby, can
+see nothing but red lips. Bah!”
+
+Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and
+freezing cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter Byrne
+sat and waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the Street of
+Seven Stars, the arc lights swung in the wind.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz, much
+crimped and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head of the long
+table. There were few, almost no Americans, the Americans flocking to
+good food at reckless prices in more fashionable pensions; to the Frau
+Gallitzenstein's, for instance, in the Kochgasse, where there was to
+be had real beefsteak, where turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and
+Christmas, and where, were one so minded, one might revel in whipped
+cream.
+
+The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the center
+of the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with wire stems and
+green paper leaves, and over the side-table, with its luxury of compote
+in tall glass dishes and its wealth of small hard cakes, there hung
+a framed motto which said, “Nicht Rauchen,” “No Smoking,”--and which
+looked suspiciously as if it had once adorned a compartment of a
+railroad train.
+
+Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a
+careful toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But he had
+gone further: He had discovered, for the first time in the three months
+of its defection, a button missing from his coat, and had set about to
+replace it. He had cut a button from another coat, by the easy method
+of amputating it with a surgical bistoury, and had sewed it in its new
+position with a curved surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized
+catgut. The operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with
+the aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he tied
+the ends in a surgeon's knot underneath and stood back to consider the
+result. It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous. After a moment or two of
+troubled thought he blacked the white catgut with a dot of ink and went
+on his way rejoicing.
+
+Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the course he
+had laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive line of thought as
+he dressed. When he was not smoking he was whistling, and when he was
+doing neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers,
+he was swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The
+materials for a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an
+obelisk in a cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive,
+and hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open--one
+window, to be exact, the room being very small--and spends most of the
+day in a warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.
+
+To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except
+subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step by
+step, the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon, weighing,
+considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached as he brushed
+back his hair and put away his sewing implements, was somewhat to the
+effect that he could have done a better piece of work with his eyes
+shut and his hands tied behind his back; and that if it were not for the
+wealth of material to work on he'd pack up and go home. Which brought
+him back to Harmony and his new responsibility. He took off the necktie
+he had absently put on and hunted out a better one.
+
+He was late at supper--an offense that brought a scowl from the head
+of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile. Harmony was
+already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish
+student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of
+language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to
+be again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly,
+aware of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did
+not understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and
+failing that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the
+day. Her bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and rather aloof.
+She ate almost nothing, and left the table before the others had
+finished.
+
+What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing eyes!
+What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with dessert! What
+heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted eyes, looking
+away from appealing ones; lips that tremble with wretchedness nibbling
+daintily at a morsel; smiles that sear; foolish bits of talk that mean
+nothing except to one, and to that one everything! Harmony, freezing at
+Peter's formal bow and gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the
+meal, or no nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering
+the little Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope of a
+glance. And over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the “Nicht Rauchen”
+ sign, and an acrimonious discussion on eugenics between an American
+woman doctor named Gates and a German matron who had had fifteen
+children, and who reduced every general statement to a personal insult.
+
+Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed, and she
+was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one. Defiantly, too, had he
+only known it, her small chin up and her color high again; playing the
+“Humoresque,” of all things, in the hope, of course, that he would
+hear it and guess from her choice the wild merriment of her mood. Peter
+rapped once or twice, but obtained no answer, save that the “Humoresque”
+ rose a bit higher; and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he
+was forced to light a cigarette to cover his pausing.
+
+Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman of
+forty or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a masculine
+disregard of clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let him help her into
+her ulster.
+
+“New girl, eh?” she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door. “Very
+gay, isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that! Honestly,
+Peter, what are we going to do?”
+
+“Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better food, but
+not for our terms.”
+
+Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put it on
+with a single jerk down over her hair.
+
+“Oh, darn money, anyhow!” she said. “Come and walk to the corner with
+me. I have a lecture.”
+
+Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his room.
+There, on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he wrote--
+
+“Are you ill? Or have I done anything?”
+
+“P. B.”
+
+This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the little
+Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said nothing, nor did
+Peter, who rose and dusted his knees. The little Bulgarian spoke no
+English and little German. Between them was the wall of language. But
+higher than this barrier was the understanding of their common sex. He
+held out his hand, still smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took
+it. Then he followed the woman doctor down the stairs.
+
+To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be
+absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts
+an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he
+had offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his
+interest. But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and
+intelligent notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his
+enjoyment of the Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed
+down its involved German.
+
+The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not approve of
+Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of
+fineness in the man himself--an intangible thing that seems to be a
+matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of
+the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.
+
+Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked
+to Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise
+combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that, and the recollection
+that it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics,
+no lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down
+and that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was
+whistling as he walked along.
+
+Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped
+under a street light to consult his watch.
+
+“Almost ten!” he said. “I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie
+I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart.”
+
+“Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?”
+
+“Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make a good
+woman understand that sort of thing.”
+
+“Thank God for that!”
+
+After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the
+“Humoresque.”
+
+Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was
+to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights
+were still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs
+and, for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced
+as out of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.
+
+“'Out of order'!” he observed. “Out of order since last spring, judging
+by that card. Vorwarts!”
+
+They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer played
+golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a
+driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to
+forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular
+development that his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails,
+without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the long steep flights with an
+elasticity that left even Boyer a step or so behind.
+
+Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat
+replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with
+smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the
+sound of beer mugs on wood.
+
+Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men
+bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and
+bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.
+
+“What do I smell, Marie?” he demanded. “Surely not sausages!”
+
+Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old
+friend. It was always sausages.
+
+“Sausages, of a truth--fat ones.'
+
+“But surely not with mustard?”
+
+“Ach, ja--englisch mustard.”
+
+Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on
+Byrne's arm.
+
+“I was very angry with you to-day.”
+
+“With me?”
+
+Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's unconventional
+menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of addressing Marie in
+English, while she replied in her own tongue.
+
+“Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and
+you--She is rich, so?”
+
+“I really don't know. I think not.”
+
+“And good?”
+
+“Yes, of course.”
+
+Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking
+up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard.
+Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She
+had put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones
+were small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.
+
+“I was sad to-night,” she said plaintively. “I wished to jump out the
+window.”
+
+Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.
+
+“And I made you feel like that?”
+
+“Not you--the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I--” She stopped
+tragically, then sniffled.
+
+“The sausages!” she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the
+kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.
+
+Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in
+Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could
+teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of
+clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing,
+offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of
+overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness
+of the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies
+that others may live.
+
+Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness
+which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of
+ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming
+egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.
+
+His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in
+Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means
+at his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne
+was living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in
+winter, starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.
+
+The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury
+of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water
+on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with
+premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been
+a fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a
+reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at
+the same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub
+sizzled if one touched it.
+
+Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom;
+the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress,
+which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again,
+opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room,
+now in chaotic disorder.
+
+Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men already
+there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing
+research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from
+Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne
+stood by waiting for the hand to be played.
+
+The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority. It was
+a regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat
+in Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie's boiled Wiener
+sausages.
+
+The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers.
+MacLean, who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in chips
+with quick gestures of his long pianist's fingers.
+
+Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out, and so,
+after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and fell to betting.
+Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe, and after a second's
+hesitation Byrne turned to him.
+
+“I don't know just what to say, Stewart,” he began in an undertone. “I'm
+sorry. I didn't want to hurt Marie, but--”
+
+“Oh, that's all right.” Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward to
+watch the game with an air of ending the discussion.
+
+“Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been kind
+to me, and I like her. You know that.”
+
+“Don't be an ass!” Stewart turned on him sharply. “Marie is a little
+fool, that's all. I didn't know it was an American girl.”
+
+Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He stayed
+out of the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about the room. He
+glanced into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where Marie hovered over
+the stove.
+
+She turned and saw him.
+
+“Come,” she called. “Watch the supper for me while I go down for more
+beer.”
+
+“But no,” he replied, imitating her tone. “Watch the supper for me while
+I go down for more beer.”
+
+“I love thee,” she called merrily. “Tell the Herr Doktor I love thee.
+And here is the pitcher.”
+
+When he returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The
+cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing
+the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a
+pinnacle of proprietorship.
+
+“Exactly,” he was saying, in reply to something gone before; “I used
+to come here Saturday nights--used to come early and take a bath.
+Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit in a corner
+and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp there, and decent food,
+and a bed that didn't suffer from necrosis in the center. Then when he
+was called home I took it.”
+
+“Girl and all, wasn't it?”
+
+“Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she is. He
+came back last fall on his wedding trip--he married a wealthy girl and
+came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here. There was the deuce to
+pay.”
+
+He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.
+
+“Jealous, eh?” from Hunter.
+
+“Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him--said he didn't
+respect her!”
+
+“It's a curious code of honor,” said Boyer thoughtfully. And indeed to
+none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl of the streets,
+driven by God knows what necessity to make her own code and, having made
+it, living up to it with every fiber of her.
+
+“Bitte zum speisen!” called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and the
+men trooped out to the kitchen.
+
+The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in the
+center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and above all
+sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer, as did the
+others, and sang German songs with a frightful accent and much vigor and
+sentiment, as also did the others.
+
+Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and told
+himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like a prince
+for the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the hollow center of
+his bed, where his big figure fitted as comfortably as though it lay in
+a washtub, and before his eyes there came a vision of Stewart's flat and
+the slippers by the fire--which was eminently human.
+
+However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with considerable
+vigor, that he'd be damned if he would--which was eminently Peter Byrne.
+Almost immediately, with the bed coverings, augmented by his overcoat,
+drawn snug to his chin, and the better necktie swinging from the gasjet
+in the air from the opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours he
+had entirely forgotten Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the little
+Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a shawl over her
+shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire, while in the dining-room
+the little chambermaid cut butter and divided it sparingly among a dozen
+breakfast trays--on each tray two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate,
+a cup. On two trays Olga, with a glance over her shoulder, placed two
+butter pats. The mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a
+keen eye for butter--and a hard heart.
+
+Katrina came to the door.
+
+“The hot water is ready,” she announced. “And the coffee also. Hast thou
+been to mass?”
+
+“Ja.”
+
+“That is a lie.” This quite on general principle, it being one of the
+cook's small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her underling,
+and one of Olga's Sunday morning's indulgences to oversleep and avoid
+the mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and without reply, being
+occupied at that moment in standing between Katrina and the extra pats
+of butter.
+
+“For the lie,” said Katrina calmly, “thou shalt have no butter this
+morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it, wicked one!”
+
+Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.
+
+“The new Fraulein is American?”
+
+“Ja.”
+
+Katrina shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Then I shall put more water to heat,” she said resignedly. “The
+Americans use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!”
+
+Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood with it
+poised in her thin young arms.
+
+“The new Fraulein is very beautiful,” she continued aloud. “Thinkest
+thou it is the hot water?”
+
+“Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?” demanded Katrina. “Go, and
+be less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who rings, but the new
+American.”
+
+Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony's door, and being bidden, entered.
+The room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her nightgown, was
+closing the outer casement. The inner still swung open. Olga, having put
+down her pitcher, shivered.
+
+“Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?”
+
+“Always with open windows.” Harmony having secured the inner casement,
+was wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the faded butterflies.
+Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh. She shook her head.
+
+“But the air of the night,” she said, “it is full of mists and
+illnesses! Will you have breakfast now?”
+
+“In ten minutes, after I have bathed.”
+
+Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen, shaking
+her head.
+
+“They are strange, the Americans!” she said to latrine. “And if to be
+lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows--”
+
+Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had passed
+with the reading of his note, and the sensation of his protection and
+nearness had been almost physical. In the virginal little apartment in
+the lodge of Maria Theresa the only masculine presence had been that
+of the Portier, carrying up coals at ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the
+accompanist who each alternate day had played for the Big Soprano to
+practice. And they had felt no deprivation, except for those occasional
+times when Scatchy developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a
+dancing-hall or one of the little theaters that opened after the opera.
+
+But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman or
+disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown herself
+on the protection of this shabby big American whom she had met but
+once, and, having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of course, that
+she realized her dependence. She had felt very old and experienced and
+exceedingly courageous as she put out her light the night before and
+took a flying leap into the bed. She was still old and experienced, if a
+trifle less courageous, that Sunday morning.
+
+Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls, two pats
+of butter--shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina the thrifty--and
+a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper torn from a notebook:--
+
+“Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company. Will
+you walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to ask you, but
+am spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one remaining American
+suit is being pressed.
+
+“P. B.”
+
+Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:--
+
+“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+“H. W.”
+
+When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway told
+Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her violin.
+The idea of work obsessed her. To-morrow there would be the hunt for
+something to do to supplement her resources, this afternoon she had
+rashly promised to walk. The morning, then, must be given up to work.
+But after all she did little.
+
+For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused outside
+her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter Byrne, listening
+while he sorted lecture memoranda at his little table in bathrobe and
+slippers, absently filed the little note with the others--where he came
+across it months later--next to a lecture on McBurney's Point, and spent
+a sad hour or so over it. Over all the sordid little pension, with its
+odors of food and stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial
+flowers, the music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.
+
+In her room across from Harmony's, Anna Gates was sewing, or preparing
+to sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the room in violent
+disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting savagely at a roll of
+pink flannel. Because she was working with curved surgeon's scissors,
+borrowed from Peter, the cut edges were strangely scalloped. Her method
+as well as her tools was unique. Clearly she was intent on a body
+garment, for now and then she picked up the flannel and held it to her.
+Having thus, as one may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to
+cut again, jaw tight set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a small
+replica of Peter Byrne sewing a button on his coat.
+
+After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong. She
+rolled up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner, and
+proceeded to her Sunday morning occupation of putting away the garments
+she had worn during the week, a vast and motley collection.
+
+On the irritability of her mood Harmony's music had a late but certain
+effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than usual, seeing that
+she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly picked up the bundle from
+the corner. She hunted about for a thimble, being certain she had
+brought one from home a year before, but failed to find it. And finally,
+bundle under her arm and smiling, she knocked at Harmony's door.
+
+“Would you mind letting me sit with you?” she asked. “I'll not stir. I
+want to sew, and my room is such a mess!”
+
+Harmony threw the door wide. “You will make me very happy, if only my
+practicing does not disturb you.”
+
+Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.
+
+“I'll probably be the disturbing element,” she said. “I'm a noisy
+sewer.”
+
+Harmony's immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor
+immediately. She borrowed a thimble--not because she cared whether
+she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the
+game--and settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For
+an hour she plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her
+bow and turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in
+her thread.
+
+“It's in the most damnable knot!” she said, and Harmony was suddenly
+aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.
+
+“Please don't pay any attention to me,” she implored. “I hate to sew.
+That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool
+about music.”
+
+“Perhaps, if you hate to sew--”
+
+“I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate
+being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and
+clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse
+and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!”
+
+Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next
+moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was
+smiling up through her glasses.
+
+“The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm
+really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad
+and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own
+cooking, but what time have I?” She spread out the pieces of flannel on
+her knee. “Does this look like anything to you?”
+
+“A petticoat, isn't it?”
+
+“I didn't intend it as a petticoat.”
+
+“I thought, on account of the scallops--”
+
+“Scallops!” Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from
+them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.
+
+“Scallops!” she gasped at last. “Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting
+'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!”
+
+Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately
+flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little
+adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to
+Peter--Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his
+hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel
+Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had
+the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been
+carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back
+on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces,
+united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the
+hospital. “Although,” she commented, “it looks more like a chair cover.”
+
+Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined
+with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the
+crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the
+mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart.
+And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than
+questioning, the faded little woman doctor knew all the story.
+
+She was rather aghast.
+
+“But suppose you cannot find anything to do?”
+
+“I must,” simply.
+
+“It's such a terrible city for a girl alone.”
+
+“I'm not really alone. I know you now.”
+
+“An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!”
+
+“And there is Peter Byrne.”
+
+“Peter!” Dr. Gates sniffed. “Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any
+comparison in destitution!”
+
+Harmony stiffened a trifle.
+
+“Of course I do not mean money,” she said. “There are such things as
+encouragement, and--and friendliness.”
+
+“One cannot eat encouragement,” retorted Dr. Gates sagely. “And
+friendliness between you and any man--bah! Even Peter is only human, my
+dear.”
+
+“I am sure he is very good.”
+
+“So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I'm a
+skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall in love with
+him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't let him fall in
+love with you. He probably will.”
+
+Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare
+for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that
+a headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised.
+Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the
+afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.
+
+Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner
+she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for
+the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty.
+For illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the
+spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of
+general practice, had come to view life along physiological lines.
+
+With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.
+
+“I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual.”
+
+“Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life--”
+
+“About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool.”
+
+Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best
+tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.
+
+“To whom?”
+
+“To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment
+she thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I said you were
+only human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil--”
+
+“I cannot imagine,” said Peter slowly, “the reason for any conversation
+about me.”
+
+“Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it
+always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then
+she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody
+was good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well.”
+
+“So you warned her against me,” said Peter grimly.
+
+“I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make
+'way with myself?”
+
+“Cui bono?” demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. “The mischief
+is done.”
+
+Dr. Gates looked up at him.
+
+“I'm in love with you myself, Peter!” she said gratefully. “Perhaps it
+is the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold
+water that evening and obeyed little Olga's “Bitte sum speisen.” The
+chairs round the dining-table were only half occupied--a free concert
+had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly
+considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of
+the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room
+far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what
+he had learned during the week--his gleanings from near-by tables in
+coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe,
+where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.
+
+Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met
+a tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was
+talking volubly--as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the
+scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the
+girl. Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of
+the intimacy of the day before.
+
+“Better?”
+
+“Not entirely. Somewhat.”
+
+“I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer
+from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them.”
+
+“I am afraid of headache tablets.”
+
+“Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!”
+
+This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what
+had she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her
+physician. That was all.
+
+“The next time I shall send Olga.”
+
+“Good!” he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as
+he might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her
+new-growing confidence.
+
+It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a
+cigarette--according to the custom of the pension, which accorded the
+“Nicht Rauchen” sign the same attention that it did to the portrait of
+the deceased Herr Schwarz--that he turned to her again.
+
+“I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night.”
+
+Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved
+herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.
+
+“Then you do not prescribe air?”
+
+“That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind my
+going along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else to do.”
+
+Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a swift
+glance of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather
+exultant himself; certainly he had been adroit.
+
+“I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep,” said Harmony,
+who had missed the by-play. “And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice
+companion, I'm sure.”
+
+It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter
+had she followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction
+mattering little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking
+of immaterial things--of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of
+the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the
+Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the
+Benk sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting
+diplomacy to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out
+what was in his heart.
+
+“Look here,” he said, “you don't care a rap about spires. I don't
+believe you know anything about them. I don't. What did that idiot of a
+woman doctor say to you to-day?”
+
+“I don't know what you mean.”
+
+“You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out with
+two premises: I'm a man, and you're young and attractive. Then she draws
+some sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?”
+
+“I don't see why we need discuss it,” said poor Harmony. “Or how you
+know--”
+
+“I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she
+came to me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to you or not,
+but--we'd started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear
+girl, you are beautiful and I know it. That's all the more reason why,
+if you'll stand for it, you need some one to look after you--I'll not
+say like a brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor
+brothers to their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and
+who isn't going to fall in love with you.”
+
+“I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you
+to.”
+
+“Certainly not. Besides, I--” Here Peter Byrne had another inspiration,
+not so good as the first--“Besides, there is somebody at home, you
+understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?”
+
+“A girl at home?”
+
+“A girl,” said Peter, lying manfully.
+
+“How very nice!” said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all
+sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of
+their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers
+and street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to
+themselves. Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked
+blissful personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money--or
+its lack--their ambitions, their hopes, even--and here was intimacy,
+indeed!--their disappointments, their failures of courage, their
+occasional loss of faith in themselves.
+
+The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward
+the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a
+chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of
+the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took
+on, against the gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for
+an occasional pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the
+streets were deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl
+rejected his offer of a taxicab.
+
+“We should be home too quickly,” she observed naively. “And we have
+so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English
+lessons in the afternoon and working all morning at my music--”
+
+And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely,
+his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what
+a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very
+slender her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.
+
+Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep
+into his soul that night.
+
+Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a
+friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they
+were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned
+in at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided
+with Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled
+mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin
+heart in his voice, the barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. He saw
+Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would
+have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.
+
+“It is only the Portier from the lodge,” she said.
+
+The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note,
+stood before Harmony, bowing.
+
+“The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad,” he said thickly. “There is no
+more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has
+only one lung.”
+
+“But think!” Harmony said in German. “No more practicing in the early
+dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is
+better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!”
+
+Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and
+bowed after them.
+
+“Gute Nacht,” he called. “Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the
+salon and a bath of the finest.”
+
+As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his
+unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the
+Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.
+
+“Do you mind if I ask one question?”
+
+“You honor me, madam.”
+
+“Then--what is the name of the girl back home?”
+
+Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine
+names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:--
+
+“Emma.”
+
+“Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!” But there was a touch of
+disappointment in her voice.
+
+Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the
+master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a
+grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano
+had been right--she had the real thing.
+
+The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself
+to an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the
+anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his
+rare enthusiasms.
+
+“Six months,” he said, “and you will go back to your America and show
+them how over here we teach violin. I will a letter--letters--give you,
+and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my
+pupil, is it not so?”
+
+Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with
+the praise and excitement.
+
+“If I can stay so long,” she answered unsteadily.
+
+“You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished
+you talk of going! Gott im Himmel!”
+
+“It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something
+to do I shall have to go back.”
+
+The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse
+his ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He
+spent five minutes in indignant protest, then:--
+
+“But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay.
+Perhaps I can now and then find a concert for you.” It was a lure he
+had thrown out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being
+always eagerly swallowed. “And no more talk of going away. I refuse to
+allow. You shall not go.”
+
+Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was
+interested. He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen
+is fifty Kronen, and South American beef is high of price. He followed
+Harmony into the outer room and bowed her out of his studio.
+
+“The Fraulein has paid?” he demanded, turning sharply to the lady
+secretary.
+
+“Always.”
+
+“After the lesson?”
+
+“Ja, Herr Professor.”
+
+“It is better,” said the master, “that she pay hereafter before the
+lesson.”
+
+“Ja, Herr Professor.”
+
+Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's name.
+There were many such crosses on the ledger.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the
+morning, hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment
+it was over. He had lectures in the evenings, too, and although he
+lingered for an hour or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken
+possession of by the little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for
+things American.
+
+On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and
+helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little
+Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the
+stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.
+
+They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of
+the man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid
+tread. The two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals
+without speech between them were rather for lack of understanding than
+for that completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was
+the first to speak after their greeting.
+
+“Marie all right?”
+
+“Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week.”
+
+“Thanks. Does it matter which night?”
+
+“Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'”
+
+“Say Friday, then.”
+
+Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood
+failed to notice it.
+
+“Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?”
+
+“What was that?”
+
+Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.
+
+“Wake up, Byrne!” he said. “You remember well enough. Neither the Days
+nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you
+go on living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double
+drain there that tells on one--eating little and being eaten much. Those
+old walls are full of vermin. Why don't you take our apartment?”
+
+“Yours?”
+
+“Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and Breidau
+can't take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and we're going to
+Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead enough to take a holiday.
+And if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or
+less, you can have it, and--a home, old man.”
+
+Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted
+him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.
+
+“Thanks,” he said. “I think not.”
+
+“Oh, all right.” Stewart was rather offended. “I can't do more than give
+you a chance.”
+
+They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of Sunday
+had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday and Tuesday.
+The sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and
+the smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in
+depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of
+musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses
+as they worked.
+
+Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his up-turned collar;
+moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather than
+precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a vision of the
+little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the table, and the
+general air of warmth and cheer, and a figure presiding over the brick
+stove in the kitchen. Byrne shook himself like a great dog and turned in
+at the gate of the hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
+
+That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned
+she faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that
+frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against
+barriers of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far
+from absolute cruelty.
+
+She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then, as
+the pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen--also in
+advance,--went on, recklessly. She played marvelously those days, crying
+out through her violin the despair she had sealed her lips against. On
+Thursday, playing for the master, she turned to find him flourishing
+his handkerchief, and went home in a sort of daze, incredulous that she
+could have moved him to tears.
+
+The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up the
+coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the chance of
+seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe
+Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle
+of native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the
+little Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was
+simmering in those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But
+instead he had kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray
+words, odd glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind
+her ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one
+of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in
+troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher
+on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that
+made even that grim official smile.
+
+Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically: so
+many hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many afternoons
+searching for something to do, making rounds of shops where her English
+might be valuable.
+
+And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one
+experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears in her
+eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first interview,
+under Peter's grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper was obviously
+suspicious of Peter. After that, whenever he could escape from clinics,
+Peter went along, but stayed outside, smoking his eternal cigarette, and
+keeping a watchful eye on things inside the shop.
+
+Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was not
+well, from the girl's eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper's face, he
+had opened the door in time to hear enough. He had lifted the proprietor
+bodily and flung him with a crash into a glass showcase of ornaments
+for the hair. Then, entirely cheerful and happy, and unmolested by the
+frightened clerks, he led Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic
+triumph bought her a bunch of valley lilies.
+
+Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very
+bad, indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own
+feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did
+a quixotic thing--which was Peter, of course, all over.
+
+He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea came to
+him there. Hardly came to him, being Marie's originally. The little flat
+was cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened her kitchen, brought in
+a waist she was making and sat sewing while the two men talked. Their
+conversation was technical, a new extirpation of the thyroid gland, a
+recent nephrectomy.
+
+In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She struggled
+with the technicalities of their talk as she sewed, finding here and
+there a comprehensive bit. At those times she sat, needle poised,
+intelligent eyes on the speakers, until she lost herself again in the
+mazes of their English.
+
+At ten o'clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her get the
+stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening beer. He took
+advantage of her absence to broach the matter of Harmony.
+
+“She's up against it, as a matter of fact,” he finished. “It ought to be
+easy enough for her to find something, but it isn't.”
+
+“I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she's rather
+handsome, isn't she?”
+
+“That's one of the difficulties. Yes.”
+
+Stewart smoked and reflected. “No friends here at all?”
+
+“None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home.”
+
+“Could she teach violin?”
+
+“I should think so.”
+
+“Aren't there any kids in the American colony who want lessons? There's
+usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any entertainments
+of the Doctors' Club.”
+
+“They don't want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I could put
+a card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!” cried Peter with a burst of
+honest resentment, “why do I have to be poor?”
+
+“If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money, could
+you?”
+
+Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he found
+in his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was carefully filling
+the mugs. “Why do you not marry her?” she asked unexpectedly. “Then you
+could take this flat. We are going to Semmering for the winter sports. I
+would show her about the stove.”
+
+“Marry her, of course!” said Peter gravely. “Just pick her up and carry
+her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to marry me need
+have nothing to do with it.”
+
+“Ah, but does she not wish it?” demanded Marie. “Are you so certain,
+stupid big one? Do not women always love you?”
+
+Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back to the
+Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest, almost humble. It
+had never occurred to him that women might care for him for himself.
+In his struggling life there had been little time for women. But about
+himself as the solution of a problem--that was different.
+
+He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the girl's
+being willing, was Stewart right--could two people live as cheaply as
+one? Marie was an Austrian and knew how to manage--that was different.
+And another thing troubled him. He dreaded to disturb the delicate
+adjustment of their relationship; the terra incognita of a young
+girl's mind daunted him. There was another consideration which he put
+resolutely in the back of his mind--his career. He had seen many a
+promising one killed by early marriage, men driven to the hack work of
+the profession by the scourge of financial necessity. But that was a
+matter of the future; the necessity was immediate.
+
+The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered Schneeberg
+drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress defended by the
+elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized again. Peter Byrne
+battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he fought he made his
+decision.
+
+He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of
+the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and
+in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost
+ran up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the
+key and he swore under his breath. He slammed the door behind him. Peter
+always slammed doors, and had an apologetic way of opening the door
+again and closing it gently, as if to show that he could. Harmony's room
+was dark, but he had surprised her once into a confession that when
+she was very downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue
+indeed. So he stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from Dr.
+Gates's room across there came a hum of conversation. He knew at once
+that Harmony was there.
+
+Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand over his
+hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries to a proposal of
+marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the door.
+
+Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in
+deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and
+pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still under way.
+
+“Peter!” she cried. “Come in and get warm.”
+
+Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round her
+shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.
+
+“Please go out!” she said. “I am not dressed.”
+
+“You are covered,” returned Anna Gates. “That's all that any sort of
+clothing can do. Don't mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed. Look out for
+pins!”
+
+Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed door
+and stared at Harmony--Harmony in the red light from the little
+open door of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit of white
+petticoat; Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and tied out of her
+eyes with an encircling band of rosy flannel.
+
+“Do sit!” cried Anna Gates. “You fill the room so. Bless you, Peter,
+what a collar!”
+
+No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve of
+proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter, seated
+now on the bed, writhed.
+
+“I rapped at Miss Wells's door,” he said. “You were not there.”
+
+This last, of course, to Harmony.
+
+Anna Gates sniffed.
+
+“Naturally!”
+
+“I had something to say to you. I--I dare say it is hardly pension
+etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say it there?”
+
+Harmony smiled above the flannel.
+
+“Could you call it through the door?”
+
+“Hardly.”
+
+“Fiddlesticks!” said Dr. Gates, rising. “I'll go over, of course, but
+not for long. There's no fire.”
+
+With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.
+
+“Please!” she implored. “I am not dressed and I'd rather not.” She
+turned to Peter. “You can say it before her, can't you? She--I have told
+her all about things.”
+
+Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that night.
+Then:--
+
+“It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment furnished--you
+could learn to use the stove, unless, of course, you don't like
+housekeeping--and food is really awfully cheap. Why, at these
+delicatessen places and bakeshops--”
+
+Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates's quizzical glance fixed
+on him, and Harmony's startled eyes.
+
+“What I am trying to say,” he exploded, “is that I believe if you would
+marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow.” He was talking
+for time now, against Harmony's incredulous face. “You'd be taking on
+others, of course. I'm not much and I'm as poor--well, you know. It--it
+was the apartment that gave me the idea--”
+
+“And the stove!” said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous laughter.
+After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It was real mirth
+with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that curious laughter of women
+that is not far from tears.
+
+Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and made a
+last feeble attempt to stick to his guns.
+
+“I mean it. You know I'm not in love with you or you with me, of course.
+But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might get along. Lord
+knows I need some one to look after me!”
+
+“And Emma?”
+
+“There is no Emma. I made her up.”
+
+Harmony sobered at that.
+
+“It is only”--she gasped a little for breath--“it is only your--your
+transparency, Peter.” It was the first time she had called him Peter.
+“You know how things are with me and you want to help me, and out of
+your generosity you are willing to take on another burden. Oh, Peter!”
+
+And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat the
+laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the cover of
+mirth.
+
+Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them both
+sternly through her glasses.
+
+“Once for all,” she said brusquely, “let such foolishness end. Peter,
+I am ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you--not yet, not for a dozen
+years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not every man can be what
+you may be if you keep your senses and stay single. And the same is true
+for you, girl. To tide over a bad six months you would sacrifice the
+very thing you are both struggling for?”
+
+“I'm sure we don't intend to do it,” replied Harmony meekly.
+
+“Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes, remember
+what I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal to the other.
+Now go away and let me alone. I'm not accustomed to proposals of
+marriage.”
+
+It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself off
+to the bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was as
+comfortable as a washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also Harmony's
+problem was yet unsolved. Also she had called him Peter.
+
+Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of that?
+
+At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to
+warm the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked
+at his door.
+
+“Yes?” said Peter, still comfortably asleep.
+
+“It is Dr. Gates.”
+
+“Sorry, Doctor--have to 'xcuse me,” mumbled Peter from the blanket.
+
+“Peter!”
+
+Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Open the door just a crack.”
+
+Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up
+to retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast from the open window
+blew round him, setting everything movable in the little room to
+quivering. He fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them,
+and yawning noisily went to the door.
+
+Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair was out
+of its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait
+down her back. She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered
+shortsightedly at Peter.
+
+“It's about Jimmy,” she said. “I don't know what's got into me, but I've
+forgotten for three days. It's a good bit more than time for a letter.”
+
+“Great Scott!”
+
+“Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a
+little. The nurse found him crying.”
+
+“The poor little devil!” said Peter contritely. “Overdue, is it? I'll
+fix it to-night.”
+
+“Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I'm off at
+seven.”
+
+“The envelope?”
+
+“Here it is. And take my candle. I'm going to bed.”
+
+That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from the
+twin clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across
+the city. It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a
+candle balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.
+
+He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had
+taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry,
+which weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter
+being strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine
+chamois. Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy's point of
+view and deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a
+harrowing incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a
+sort of glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off
+the chamois.
+
+The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to
+Jimmy Conroy--an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic,
+bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny
+village in the Austrian Tyrol.
+
+It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to
+sleep.
+
+It was just two o'clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her
+ward in the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his
+pillow, and taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended
+fury.
+
+“Now, thou bad one!” she said. “Awake, when the Herr Doktor orders
+sleep! Shall I use the slipper?”
+
+The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.
+
+“I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the
+mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes--”
+
+“The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter of a
+certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father has
+perhaps captured a great boar, or a--a chamois, and he writes of it.”
+
+“Do chamois have horns?”
+
+“Ja. Great horns--so.”
+
+“He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?”
+
+“None. Now sleep, or--the slipper.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+So far Harmony's small world in the old city had consisted of Scatchy
+and the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off in the
+firmament the master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone, weeping
+anxious postcards from every way station it is true, but nevertheless
+gone. Peter and Anna Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds
+held out. To them now she was about to add Jimmy.
+
+The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor's chaos of pink
+flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and complete
+even to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to be presented. It
+was with mingled emotions that Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to
+Harmony the next morning.
+
+“He hasn't been so well the last day or two,” she said. “He doesn't
+sleep much--that's the worst of those heart conditions. Sometimes, while
+I've been working on this thing, I've wondered--Well, we're making a
+fight anyhow. And better take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and
+make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope--”
+
+Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital, meeting the
+doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy's little story quite
+well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.
+
+“Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear,” she had finished.
+“You think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I think I
+have my own little tragedy, because I have to go through the rest of
+life alone, when taken in time I'd have been a good wife and mother.
+Still I have my work. But this little chap, brought over here by a
+father who hoped to see him cured, and spent all he had to bring him
+here, and then--died. It gets me by the throat.”
+
+“And the boy does not know?” Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.
+
+“No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the mountains.
+When we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he was buried. It took
+about all the money there was. He wrote home about it, too, to the place
+they came from. There has never been any reply. Then ever since Peter
+has written these letters. Jimmy lives for them.”
+
+Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that. Peter
+thought thus. A very large part of Harmony's life was Peter in those
+days.
+
+She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for
+Anna Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his
+letter that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of
+the night before. Of the proposal, most of all--it was so eminently
+characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its
+execution. Harmony's thought of Peter was very tender that morning
+as she stood in the arched gateway out of reach of the wind from the
+Schneeberg. The tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made
+her very beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for
+a bus, and stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm, recognized
+and admired her. After all, the American women were chic, she decided,
+although some of the doctors had wives of a dowdiness--Himmel! And she
+could copy the Fraulein's hat for two Kronen and a bit of ribbon she
+possessed.
+
+The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a Dozent
+with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into it, and the
+Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could not marry because
+the hospital board forbade it, made a speech for Jimmy in awe-inspiring
+German, ending up with a poem that was intended to be funny, but that
+made the nurses cry. From which it will be seen that Jimmy was a great
+favorite.
+
+During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a ceremony,
+Jimmy kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates's hand and waited. That
+the letter had come was enough. He lay back in anticipatory joy, and
+let himself be talked over, and bathrobed, and his hair parted Austrian
+fashion and turned up over a finger, which is very Austrian indeed.
+He liked Harmony. The girl caught his eyes on her more than once. He
+interrupted the speech once to ask her just what part of the robe she
+had made, and whether she had made the tassel. When she admitted the
+tassel, his admiration became mixed with respect.
+
+It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the barred
+window behind Jimmy's bed, and brought into dazzling radiance the pink
+bathrobe, and Harmony's eyes, and fat Nurse Elisabet's white apron. It
+lay on the bedspread in great squares, outlined by the shadows of the
+window bars. Now and then the sentry, pacing outside, would advance as
+far as Jimmy's window, and a warlike silhouette of military cap and
+the upper end of a carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events,
+however, were rare, the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and
+the odor of boiling onions from the lodge just inside.
+
+The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the nurses went
+about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a hairpin from her
+hair and made a great show of opening the many times opened envelope.
+
+“The letter at last!” she said. “Shall I read it or will you?”
+
+“You read it. It takes me so long. I'll read it all day, after you are
+gone. I always do.”
+
+Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter's first halting
+lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold. They were mainly
+an apology for the delay. Then forgetting discomfort in the joy of
+creation, he became more comfortable. The account of the near-accident
+was wonderfully graphic; the description of the chamois was fervid, if
+not accurate. But consternation came with the end.
+
+The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The doctor
+read on.
+
+“For Heaven's sake,” said Peter's frantic postscript, “find out how much
+a medium-sized chamois--”
+
+Dr. Gates stopped “--ought to weigh,” was the rest of it, “and fix it
+right in the letter. The kid's too smart to be fooled and I never saw a
+chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns, haven't they?”
+
+“That's funny!” said Jimmy Conway.
+
+“That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake,” remarked Dr. Gates,
+with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to Harmony.
+
+“How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?”
+
+“I think,” observed Harmony, leaning forward, “that little boys must
+not ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is only six weeks
+off.”
+
+“I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the boar's
+tusks.”
+
+For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter of a
+boar, had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of tusks. The tusks
+had not been so difficult. But horns!
+
+Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more questions. The
+morning's excitement had tired him, and he lay back. Dr. Gates went to
+hold a whispered consultation with the nurse, and came back, looking
+grave.
+
+The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.
+
+The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony--to find some one
+worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire of women to do
+something, however small, for some one else. Her own troubles looked
+very small to her that day as she left the hospital and stepped out into
+the bright sunshine.
+
+She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to him.
+
+“Do you wish to do a very kind thing?” she asked in German.
+
+Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea, and
+nay, nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the sun was
+moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was near.
+
+“What do you wish?”
+
+“Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do not
+think--perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not, now and then,
+pass the window? It pleases him.”
+
+“Pass the window! But why?”
+
+“In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and the
+gun.”
+
+“Ah, the gun!” He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an
+officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he
+stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the
+girl knew he would do as she had desired.
+
+That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the professors
+at the hospital desired English conversation at two Kronen an hour.
+
+Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony was
+engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did much more
+than offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her self-confidence,
+although the immediate result was rather tragic.
+
+The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with
+Harmony, engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that
+afternoon. It was the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived five
+minutes late, panting, hat awry, and so full of the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister that she could think of nothing else.
+
+Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her fifty
+Kronen before the secretary as she went in. The master was out of humor.
+Should he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept waiting for a chit
+of a girl--only, of course, he said “das Kindchen” or some other German
+equivalent for chit--and then have her come into the sacred presence
+breathless, and salute him between gasps as the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister?
+
+Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also rather
+tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped
+her bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one's infant
+child from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage
+when with a lady.
+
+The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at Harmony.
+Then with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked to the outer
+room, and picking up the envelope with the fifty Kronen held it out to
+her without a word.
+
+Harmony's world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly at the
+envelope in her hand, at the master's retreating back.
+
+Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled
+together. Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady secretary
+touched her arm.
+
+“It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is sorry.
+You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will be well. You
+are his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat for grief that he
+has hurt you.”
+
+The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary's voice was unmistakable.
+Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the two students who
+had laughed. They were not laughing now. Something of fellowship and
+understanding passed between them in the glance. After all, it was in
+the day's work--would come to one of them next, perhaps. And they had
+much in common--the struggle, their faith, the everlasting loneliness,
+the little white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.
+
+Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of days,
+Harmony went down the three long flights and out into the brightness of
+the winter day.
+
+On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward her,
+giving a definite impression of being bound for some particular
+destination and of being behind time. That this was not the case was
+shown by the celerity with which, when he saw Harmony, he turned about
+and walked with her.
+
+“I had an hour or two,” he explained, “and I thought I'd walk. But
+walking is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk alone. How
+about the Frau Professor?”
+
+“She has taken me on. I'm very happy. But, Dr. Byrne--”
+
+“You called me Peter last night.”
+
+“That was different. You had just proposed to me.”
+
+“Oh, if that's all that's necessary--” He stopped in the center of the
+busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.
+
+“Please, Peter!”
+
+“Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?”
+
+“She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them.”
+
+“For instance?”
+
+“Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes.”
+
+“Never owned anything taxable except a dog--and that wasn't a tax
+anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or
+surgery, where I'd be of some use?”
+
+“She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties.”
+
+“Well, I've got something to say on that.” He pulled from his overcoat
+pocket a largish bundle--Peter always bulged with packages--and held
+it out for her to see. “Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my
+compliments,” he said, “that because some idiot at home sent me five
+pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here,
+I have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian
+customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty.
+I offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it.”
+
+“Really, Peter?”
+
+“Really.”
+
+Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars was
+fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She reached
+over and patted his arm.
+
+“You'll make it up in some way. Can't you cut off some little
+extravagance?”
+
+“I might cut down on my tailor bills.” He looked down at himself
+whimsically. “Or on ties. I'm positively reckless about ties!”
+
+They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that
+eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a
+dog-trot. Peter looked at them critically.
+
+“Bosnians,” he observed. “Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out
+of ten of them tubercular. It's a rotten game, this military play of
+Europe. How's Jimmy?”
+
+“We left him very happy with your letter.”
+
+Peter flushed. “I expect it was pretty poor stuff,” he apologized. “I've
+never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois--”
+
+“He says his father will surely send him the horns.”
+
+Peter groaned.
+
+“Of course!” he said. “Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an eagle?
+One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the
+letter?”
+
+“He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands.”
+
+Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he
+talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only
+there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club
+at home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his
+hobby.
+
+“Scum of the earth, most of them,” he said, his plain face glowing.
+“Dirty little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco;
+and one of them pawned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing
+the game right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them!
+Used to line 'em up and make 'em spell, and the two best spellers were
+allowed to fight it out with gloves--my own method, and it worked.
+Spell! They'd spell their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee,
+how I hated to give them up!”
+
+This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before.
+For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always
+seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother
+attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof.
+Peter felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other
+things.
+
+A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension
+Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in
+ulster and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was
+coming down with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up
+the staircase like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed
+Peter and Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.
+
+“I've been waiting for you two,” she flung at them. “I've had a terrific
+row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!”
+
+It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after
+everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung,
+at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the
+sharp little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly
+heart.
+
+“Sit down, child.” Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. “You are fagged
+out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much
+did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?”
+
+It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.
+
+“I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it
+will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper,
+I'm sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria
+Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for us!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in
+the cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the conversational
+bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.
+
+Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of
+Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars--back, but with a difference.
+True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges, obedient to
+every whim of the December gales; but the casement windows in the salon
+no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of
+rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented
+extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a
+battered but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a
+table with an oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove
+gleamed warm with fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined
+medical books of Peter and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they
+used in common.
+
+Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria
+Theresa. But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the
+stove open, and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed,
+with Harmony playing softly, it took resolution on Peter's part to
+put on his overcoat and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a
+discussion of the function of the pituitary body.
+
+The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only
+greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal,
+which had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they
+bought in quantity and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp
+was a trifle. They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across
+boasted a deer from the mountains. They had other game occasionally,
+when Peter, carrying home a mysterious package, would make them guess
+what it might contain. Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits.
+She knew how to cook rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.
+
+For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing
+to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance
+of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the
+tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch
+him. Peter was firm.
+
+It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.
+
+“Don't be too obstinate, Peter,” she admonished him. “The child needs
+occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the
+financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her
+heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund.”
+
+And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur
+from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna
+almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make
+certain of her usefulness.
+
+A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier
+shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of
+the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the
+Austrians.
+
+The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least
+of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women,
+and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound
+or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was
+growing round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real
+change was in Harmony herself.
+
+The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which
+such changes come--not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath.
+One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion,
+quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional
+introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman,
+tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified
+on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and high
+spirits.
+
+The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had
+been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the
+Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be
+recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every
+odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had
+had a bad week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In
+vain the sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and
+nodded through it; in vain--when the street was deserted and there
+was none to notice--he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the
+pavement outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and
+ringing clang.
+
+In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing
+unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as
+never was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he
+carefully emphasized.
+
+And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the
+aid of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the
+barred window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had
+almost fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the
+manual of arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all
+most exciting.
+
+Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken
+him some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in
+jelly and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had
+been a great success.
+
+It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near
+his heart.
+
+“The horns haven't come, have they?” he asked wistfully.
+
+“No, not yet.”
+
+“Do you think he got my letter about them?”
+
+“He answered it, didn't he?”
+
+Jimmy drew a long breath. “It's very funny. He's mostly so quick. If I
+had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the
+bed. And I could pretend I was hunting.”
+
+Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw
+hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store
+a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head
+down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the
+shop door as if mutely begging admission.
+
+She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.
+Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The
+wild-game seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he
+would mount head and antlers for his wife's cousin in Galicia as a
+Christmas gift.
+
+Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was
+profoundly depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early
+and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile.
+Anna was not yet home.
+
+Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a
+movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.
+
+“Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always
+beautiful, but--you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony.”
+
+“That is because you like me. We always think our friends are
+beautiful.”
+
+“I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful.”
+
+The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table,
+and Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast
+fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few
+street sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from
+the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying
+humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed
+halls, its dark and twisting staircases.
+
+Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with
+the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had
+been growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was
+very comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
+Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are
+written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger
+gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed
+gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship,
+and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does
+not thrive on hunger.
+
+Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the
+struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy
+life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken
+himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the
+luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck.
+So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And
+now!
+
+He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he
+was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands
+hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.
+
+The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features.
+Harmony, knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.
+
+“I think you are sad to-night, Peter.”
+
+“Depressed a bit. That's all.”
+
+“It isn't money again?”
+
+It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before
+Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a
+hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been
+very upsetting.
+
+“Not more than usual. Don't mind me. I'll probably end in a roaring bad
+temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!”
+
+Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested
+a hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.
+
+“I have hurt you in some way?”
+
+“Of course not.”
+
+“Could--could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes.”
+
+“You wouldn't understand.”
+
+“You haven't quarreled with Anna?” Harmony asked, real concern in her
+voice.
+
+“No. Good Lord, Harmony, don't ask me what's wrong! I don't know
+myself.”
+
+He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the
+wall. Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen
+was entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare
+floor and the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and
+the candle when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.
+
+“Dearest,” he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him,
+was kissing her lips, her hair.
+
+Harmony's heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him.
+The gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved
+senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.
+
+After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go.
+Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had
+torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left
+her only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him
+breathing. He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that
+was left in him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms
+again and keep her there.
+
+That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.
+
+She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned
+and faced him.
+
+“That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter,” she said quietly.
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“There isn't any question about it.”
+
+He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still
+obsessed him. “Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If
+there is a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and
+loneliness--”
+
+“It has not made me happy.”
+
+Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual.
+Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He
+knew then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched
+arms.
+
+“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it.”
+
+“I would rather not talk about it, please.”
+
+The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and
+was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and,
+after his habit, shook himself.
+
+“Very well, we'll not talk of it. But, for Heaven's sake, Harmony, don't
+avoid me. I'm not a cad. I'll let you alone.”
+
+There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of
+promise from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered
+the kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an
+already overfed stove.
+
+That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty
+city fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two
+hours later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers
+nothing, the Portier's wife awakened.
+
+The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the
+Portier's wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the
+Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen
+seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he
+ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic
+respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like
+evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.
+
+The Portier's wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing
+to the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping
+that day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty
+air. Words had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in
+unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up--the floor was cold
+and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer
+across the street, as it swung on its hook?
+
+The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron
+candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the
+Portier's pillow. No startled yell followed.
+
+Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier's wife forgot the cold floor and
+the wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.
+
+Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even
+stood open an inch or two.
+
+Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door
+and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned
+kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an
+hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice
+to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain
+swung in the wind.
+
+At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had
+changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert
+Society--What was that?
+
+From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
+
+She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now
+lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with
+suspicion.
+
+“Thou hast been out of thy bed!”
+
+“But no!”
+
+“An hour since the bed was empty.”
+
+“Thou dreamest.”
+
+“The chain is off the door.”
+
+“Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the Americans
+above? Sleep and keep peace.”
+
+He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier's wife crawled
+into her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson feather
+comfort. But her soul was shaken.
+
+The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones out to
+do his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might be told by the
+soles of the feet, which were always soiled.
+
+At dawn the Portier's wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her
+sleeping lord's feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite black, as
+of one who had tramped in garden mould.
+
+Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened the door
+from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set out a pitcher for
+the milk.
+
+On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across the
+street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was written the one
+word, “Still!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps by
+which the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great leaps but
+with a thousand small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves
+its mark, a footprint on a naked soul. We trace a life by its scars, as
+a tree by its rings.
+
+Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and this
+with every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine affection for
+the girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions
+that Harmony's veil had been woven. To Anna Gates, worn with a thousand
+sleepless nights, a thousand thankless days, withered before her time
+with the struggling routine of medical practice, sapped with endless
+calls for sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became
+physiological.
+
+Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was rent.
+
+To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious creed,
+a philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung strange
+bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities, personal
+liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law and the
+prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and her prophet.
+
+In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no mischief.
+Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even in the event of
+the opportunity it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength
+of her convictions. Men love theories, but seldom have the courage of
+them, and Anna Gates was largely masculine. Women, being literal, are
+apt to absorb dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When it is
+false doctrine they discover it too late.
+
+Harmony was now a woman.
+
+Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to
+harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony's eyes
+widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased
+her more than to pit her individualism against the girl's rigid and
+conventional morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable
+argument.
+
+On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took
+place--hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing.
+Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been
+practicing, and at the end she played a little winter song by some
+modern composer. It breathed all the purity of a white winter's day; it
+was as chaste as ice and as cold; and yet throughout was the thought of
+green things hiding beneath the snow and the hope of spring.
+
+Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather
+ashamed of her thought.
+
+“It seems that way to me,” she finished apologetically. “It sounds
+rather silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes
+certain things.”
+
+“And this gentleman who writes of winter?”
+
+“I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one.”
+
+“Indeed!”
+
+“When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it,
+exactly as in books--the difference between a love story and--and--”
+
+“--a dictionary!”
+
+“You always laugh,” Harmony complained
+
+“That's better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in
+this world I want to weep always.”
+
+“I don't find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there
+are good ones.”
+
+“Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose.”
+
+“There are plenty of good men.”
+
+“What do you call a good man?”
+
+Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:--
+
+“Honorable men.”
+
+Anna smiled. “My dear child,” she said, “you substitute the code of a
+gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?”
+
+Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.
+
+“Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!
+When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.
+To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman--and a fifth
+over--for every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples
+there is a derelict like myself, mateless.”
+
+Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her
+resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless,
+brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the
+atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single women were always
+presumed to be thus by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those
+weaker sisters who had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly
+a derelict, frankly regretted her maiden condition and railed with
+bitterness against her enforced childlessness. The near approach of
+Christmas had for years found her morose and resentful. There are, here
+and there, such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives,
+their sole passion that of maternity.
+
+Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her
+resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and
+offered her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of
+the individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and
+though refusing to accept Anna's theories, found her faith in her own
+weakened. She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up
+out of her discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written
+high in its firmament.
+
+When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the
+girl's stricken face.
+
+“I'm a fool!” she said contritely. “If Peter had been here he'd have
+throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and
+theorists are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about
+us--we never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I've
+been talking.”
+
+Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for
+Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony
+from New York. The Big Soprano was very glad to be back and spent two
+pages over her chances for concert work.
+
+“... I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had had the
+money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing 'Brunnhilde,' it would have
+helped a lot. I could have said I'd sung in opera in Europe and at least
+have had a hearing at the Met. But I didn't, and I'm back at the church
+again and glad to get my old salary. If it's at all possible, stay until
+the master has presented you in a concert. He's quite right, you haven't
+a chance unless he does. And now I'll quit grumbling.
+
+“Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely, flushed with
+excitement and having been up since dawn curling her hair. He was rather
+a disappointment--small and blond, with light blue eyes, and almost
+dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn't care how pale a man's eyes were if
+he looked at me the way Henry looked at her.
+
+“They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to be alone
+together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could swallow for the lump
+in my throat, by myself. I was homesick enough in old Wien, but I am
+just as homesick now that I am here, for we are really homesick only for
+people, not places. And no one really cared whether I came back or not.”
+
+Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day before,
+but with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the situation was
+unpleasant and decide to leave? What if a reckless impulse, recklessly
+carried out, were to break up an arrangement that had made a green oasis
+of happiness and content for all of them in the desert of their common
+despair?
+
+If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to argue,
+to justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally. He almost
+groaned aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the wintry garden.
+
+He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his word.
+“I am not a beast. I'll let you alone,” he had said. She had had a bad
+night, as nights go. She had gone through the painful introspection
+which, in a thoroughly good girl, always follows such an outburst as
+Peter's. Had she said or done anything to make him think--Surely she had
+not! Had she been wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.
+
+While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an unaccustomed
+silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron candlestick in
+hand, Harmony, having read the Litany through in the not particularly
+religious hope of getting to sleep, was dreaming placidly. It was Peter
+who tossed and turned almost all night. Truly there had been little
+sleep that night in the old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the kitchen
+while supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories forgotten and wearing
+a knitted shawl against drafts, was making a salad, and Harmony, all
+anxiety and flushed with heat, was broiling a steak.
+
+Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and prayer.
+
+“Peter,” she called, “you may set the table. And try to lay the cloth
+straight.”
+
+Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched
+business of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in mouth.
+
+“Suppose I refuse?” he questioned. “You--you haven't been very friendly
+with me to-day, Harry.”
+
+“I?”
+
+“Don't quarrel, you children,” cried Anna, beating eggs vigorously.
+“Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The Portier loves her.”
+
+“I'm sure I said good-evening to you.”
+
+“You usually say, 'Good-evening, Peter.'”
+
+“And I did not?”
+
+“You did not.”
+
+“Then--Good-evening, Peter.”
+
+“Thank you.”
+
+His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday's
+promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with forgiveness and
+restoration.
+
+“Sometimes,” said Peter humbly, “when I am in very great favor, you say,
+'Good-evening, Peter, dear.'”
+
+“Good-evening, Peter, dear,” said Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving
+smoothly. Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and through
+Marie's frugality and the extra month's wages at Christmas, which was
+Marie's annual perquisite, being temporarily in funds the sky seemed
+clear enough, and Walter Stewart started on his holiday with a
+comfortable sense of financial security.
+
+Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie's temporary
+exile in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of
+the little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with
+long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's
+kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She
+disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there
+was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment.
+Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church
+and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty
+years' accumulation, that “Frank” might catch up with his profession.
+
+She had explained it rather tremulously at home.
+
+“Father wants to go,” she said. “You children are big enough now to be
+left. He's always wanted to do it, but we couldn't go while you were
+little.”
+
+“But, mother!” expostulated the oldest girl. “When you are so afraid of
+the ocean! And a year!”
+
+“What is to be will be,” she had replied. “If I'm going to be drowned
+I'll be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub. And I'll not
+let father go alone.”
+
+Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the
+children gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so
+elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase
+anything abroad. She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest
+her eyes lead her into the temptation of the shops. In Vienna she wore
+her home-town outfit with determination, vaguely conscious that the
+women about her had more style, were different. She priced unsuitable
+garments wistfully, and went home to her trunks full of best materials
+that would never wear out. The children, knowing her, had bought the
+best.
+
+To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is hard to
+say by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory. It
+was as though his own status gained by it. He had much the same feeling
+about the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as
+if irregularity were thus regularized.
+
+Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn an
+experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn
+under her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very pretty, rather
+frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire
+evening.
+
+So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so
+conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart breaking the law and
+trying to keep the letter!
+
+On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There was
+much to do. The house must be left clean and shining. There must be no
+feminine gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely
+masculine establishment. At the last moment, so late that it sent her
+heart into her mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from
+Stewart's watchful eyes. She gave it to the milk girl.
+
+Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr
+Doktor's American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy,
+bound with iron. And with her own clothing she packed Stewart's, the
+dress-suit he had worn once to the Embassy, a hat that folded, strange
+American shoes, and books--always books. The Herr Doktor would study
+at Semmering. When all was in readiness and Stewart was taking a final
+survey, Marie ran downstairs and summoned a cab. It did not occur to her
+to ask him to do it. Marie's small life was one of service, and besides
+there was an element in their relationship that no one but Marie
+suspected, and that she hid even from herself. She was very much in
+love with this indifferent American, this captious temporary god of her
+domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred to Stewart; but
+Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had more than once
+caught a look in Marie's eyes as she turned them on the other man, and
+had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.
+
+When the train was well under way, however, and he found no disturbing
+element among the three others in the compartment, Stewart relaxed.
+Semmering was a favorite resort with the American colony, but not until
+later in the winter. In December there were rains in the mountains, and
+low-lying clouds that invested some of the chalets in constant fog.
+It was not until the middle of January that the little mountain train
+became crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and
+jaunty feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with Alpine
+cloaks and iron-pointed sticks.
+
+Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her life,
+and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very shadow of the
+Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.
+
+Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles or
+so away above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed the cog
+railroad, she had seen its white head turn rosy in the setting sun, and
+once when a German tourist from Munich had handed her his fieldglass she
+had even made out some of the crosses that showed where travelers had
+met their deaths. Now she would be very close. If the weather were good,
+she might even say a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of
+those who had died. It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when
+one has money and leisure.
+
+The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up the
+mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were moments when
+the track held to the cliffs only by gigantic fingers of steel, while
+far below were peaceful valleys and pink-and-blue houses and churches
+with gilded spires. There were vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed,
+and always there were tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a
+child in others; she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched
+him for comfort.
+
+“It is so dark,” she apologized, “and it frightens me, the mountain
+heart. In your America, have you so great mountains?”
+
+Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood racing.
+
+“Much larger,” he said magnificently. “I haven't seen a hill in Europe
+I'd exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the mountains there we
+use railway coaches. These toy railroads are a joke. At home we'd use
+'em as street-cars.”
+
+“Really! I should like to see America.”
+
+“So should I.”
+
+The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America was
+apt to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him, which was
+even worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not repulsed, became
+silent.
+
+At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left the
+train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the platform
+beer and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train resumed its
+clanking progress they ate luncheon, drinking the beer from the bottles
+and slicing the sausage with a penknife. It was a joyous trip, a
+red-letter day in the girl's rather sordid if not uneventful life. The
+Herr Doktor was pleased with her. He liked her hat, and when she
+flushed with pleasure demanded proof that she was not rouged. Proof was
+forthcoming. She rubbed her cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and
+produced in triumph its unreddened purity.
+
+“Thou suspicious one!” she pouted. “I must take off the skin to assure
+thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none.”
+
+“You're a good child.” He stooped over and kissed one scarlet cheek and
+then being very comfortable and the beer having made him drowsy, he put
+his head in her lap and slept.
+
+When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered above
+and the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near. They were
+frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were long lines of
+granite avalanche sheds. The little passage of the car was full of
+tourists looking down.
+
+“We are very close, I am sure,” an American girl was saying just outside
+the doorway. “See, isn't that the Kurhaus? There, it is lost again.”
+
+The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had spoken
+was young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the first time and
+moved to a more decorous distance from Marie.
+
+Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her thoughts
+were busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also and the Herr
+Doktor would meet her. But that was foolish! There were other resorts
+besides Semmering, and in the little villa to which they went there
+would be no Americans. It was childish to worry about a girl whose back
+and profile only she had seen. Also profiles were deceptive; there was
+the matter of the ears. Marie's ears were small and set close to her
+head. If the American Fraulein's ears stuck out or her face were only
+short and wide! But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once
+swiftly into the compartment. She was quite lovely.
+
+Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of stretching and
+yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not speak to the girl;
+Marie noted that with some comfort. But shortly after she saw him
+conversing easily with a male member of the party. Her heart sank again.
+Life was moving very fast for Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the
+train.
+
+Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered his own
+cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels together, a German
+custom he had picked up. The girl was impressed; Marie saw that. When
+they drew into the station at Semmering Stewart helped the American
+party off first and then came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than
+the little Austrian's would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape
+attention, once they were out of the train and moving toward the gate
+of the station. He stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the
+hand-luggage and picked it up again, as though it weighed heavily,
+whereas it was both small and light. He loitered through the gate and
+paused to exchange a word with the gateman.
+
+The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh and well
+up the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated side by side in
+a straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a robe over their knees,
+and a noisy driver high above them on the driving-seat. Stewart spoke to
+her then, the first time for half an hour.
+
+Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered wide
+over the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens, hidden
+from the roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery separated by
+valleys. One might live in one part of Semmering for a month and never
+suspect the existence of other parts, or wander over steep roads and
+paths for days and never pass twice over the same one. The Herr Doktor
+might not see the American girl again--and if he did! Did he not see
+American girls wherever he went?
+
+The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing. Below
+in the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue shadows, of
+cows with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of houses with dark
+faces that opened an eye of lamplight as one looked.
+
+Across the valley and far above--Marie pointed without words. Her small
+heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it, steeper, more
+beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset hue of rose was the
+Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation as he gazed with her. He
+reached over and covered both her hands with his large one under the
+robe.
+
+The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of ecstasy,
+leaned back and watched the mountain; its crown faded from rose to gold,
+from gold to purple with a thread of black. There was a shadow on the
+side that looked like a cross. Marie stopped the sleigh at a wayside
+shrine, and getting out knelt to say a prayer for the travelers who had
+died on the Rax. They had taken a room at a small villa where board was
+cheap, and where the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier
+sort from Bavaria. Both the season and the modest character of the
+establishment promised them quiet and seclusion.
+
+To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury. It clung
+to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor, looked out from the
+back of the building over the valley, which fell away almost sheer from
+beneath their windows. A tiny balcony outside, with access to it by a
+door from the bedroom, looked far down on the tops of tall pines. It
+made Marie dizzy.
+
+She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be unpacked
+and the Herr Doktor's things put away, his shoes in rows, as he liked
+them, and his shaving materials laid out on the washstand. Then there
+was a new dress to put on, that she might do him credit at supper.
+
+Stewart's bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and the
+draft under the balcony door; the light was wrong for shaving. But the
+truth came out at last and found Marie not unprepared.
+
+“The fact is,” he said, “I'm not going to eat with you to-night, dear.
+I'm going to the hotel.”
+
+“With the Americans?”
+
+“Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother--with the young
+man you saw.”
+
+Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to take
+off the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just fastened and
+fighting back tears as she struggled with it.
+
+“Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking.”
+
+“I am not sulking.”
+
+“Why should you change your clothes?”
+
+“Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish to
+wear it.”
+
+Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had walked for
+five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel he found the party
+waiting for him, the women in evening gowns. The girl, whose name was
+Anita, was bewitching in pale green.
+
+That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind once
+more--a perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation, enlivened by a
+bit of sweet champagne, an hour or two on the terrace afterward with the
+women in furs, and stars making a jeweled crown for the Rax.
+
+He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and opening the
+door of the room found her missing.
+
+She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the balcony
+and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold, but she was wise
+with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.
+
+“Didst thou have a fine evening?”
+
+“Wonderful!”
+
+“I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested.”
+
+“Good, little Marie!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+The card in the American Doctors' Club brought a response finally.
+It was just in time. Harmony's funds were low, and the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister had gone to St. Moritz for the winter. She regretted the
+English lessons, but there were always English at St. Moritz and it cost
+nothing to talk with them. Before she left she made Harmony a present.
+“For Christmas,” she explained. It was a glass pin-tray, decorated
+beneath with labels from the Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a
+picture of the Emperor.
+
+The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east
+wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old
+garden gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it. It flew back
+violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in process of egress down
+the walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer, clad as usual in the best
+broadcloth and wearing her old sable cape, made over according to her
+oldest daughter's ideas into a staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the
+path now and Mrs. Boyer was gasping for breath.
+
+“I'm so sorry!” Harmony exclaimed. “It was stupid of me; but the
+wind--Is this your muff?”
+
+Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to
+extract a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down the
+broadcloth. Harmony stood apologetically by. It is explanatory of Mrs.
+Boyer's face, attitude, and costume that the girl addressed her in
+English.
+
+“I backed in,” she explained. “So few people come, and no Americans.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this humble
+apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at Harmony.
+
+“It really is no matter,” she said, still coolly but with indications of
+thawing. “I am only glad it did not strike my nose. I dare say it would
+have, but I was looking up to see if it were going to snow.” Here she
+saw the violin case and became almost affable.
+
+“There was a card in the Doctors' Club, and I called--” She hesitated.
+
+“I am Miss Wells. The card is mine.”
+
+“One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin lessons
+and I offered to come. The mother is very busy.”
+
+“I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can talk
+about it.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the tea.
+She had had no good tea since she had left England, and was inclined to
+suspect all of it.
+
+They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead,
+explaining this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door, here
+an ancient bit of furniture not considered worthy of salvage, there
+a closed and locked room, home of ghosts and legends. To Harmony this
+elderly woman, climbing slowly behind her, was a bit of home. There
+had been many such in her life; women no longer young, friends of her
+mother's who were friends of hers; women to whom she had been wont to
+pay the courtesy of a potted hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas
+or a bit of custard during an illness. She had missed them all cruelly,
+as she had missed many things--her mother, her church, her small
+gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau Professor Bergmeister
+might allay her longing for these comfortable, middle-aged, placid-eyed
+friends of hers. But the Frau Professor Bergmeister had proved to be a
+frivolous and garrulous old woman, who substituted ease for comfort,
+and who burned a candle on the name-day of her first husband while her
+second was safely out of the house.
+
+So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way up the
+stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily
+engaged in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples Harmony
+had had about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to get them
+safely out of the place and to the hospital. So Peter was polishing the
+horns. Harmony had not expected to find him home, and paused, rather
+startled.
+
+“Oh, I didn't know you were home.”
+
+Peter spoke without turning.
+
+“Try to bear up under it,” he said. “I'm home and hungry, sweetheart!”
+
+“Peter, please!”
+
+Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in the salon
+and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But that keen-eyed
+lady had known him before he turned, had taken in the domesticity of the
+scene and Peter's part in it, and had drawn the swift conclusion of the
+pure of heart.
+
+“I'll come again,” she said hurriedly. “I--I must really get home. Dr.
+Boyer will be there, and wondering--”
+
+“Mrs. Boyer!” Peter knew her.
+
+“Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn't it? How unexpected to find you here!”
+
+“I live here.”
+
+“So I surmised.”
+
+“Three of us,” said Peter. “You know Anna Gates, don't you?”
+
+“I'm afraid not. Really I--”
+
+Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost damning.
+
+“She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken me in
+as a boarder. Please sit down.”
+
+Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly puzzled
+at Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two single women
+and one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative strangers, setting up
+housekeeping together had never occurred to her. Many a single woman
+whom she knew at home took a gentleman into the house as a roomer, and
+thereafter referred to him as “he” and spent hours airing the curtains
+of smoke and even, as “he” became a member of the family, in sewing on
+his buttons. There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement;
+merely a concession to economic pressure.
+
+She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but bustling
+about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her cheeks flushed with
+excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau Professor had gone, the
+prospect of a music pupil meant everything. An American child, too!
+Fond as Harmony was of children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who
+walked the parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and
+fixed eyes through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted
+her. They were never alone, those Austrian children--always under
+surveillance, always restrained, always prepared to kiss the hand of
+whatever relative might be near and to take themselves of to anywhere so
+it were somewhere else.
+
+“I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American child,” said
+Harmony, bringing in the tea.
+
+But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the American
+child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked
+most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult
+situation with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea
+was good; that was one thing.
+
+She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the concession
+of putting it on a chair as savoring too much of acceptance if not
+approval, and sipped her tea out of a spoon as becomes a tea-lover.
+Peter, who loathed tea, lounged about the room, clearly in the way, but
+fearful to leave Harmony alone with her. She was quite likely, at the
+first opportunity, to read her a lesson on the conventions, if nothing
+worse; to upset the delicate balance of the little household he was
+guarding. So he stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story,
+while Harmony toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the
+lessons. None came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and put
+down her cup.
+
+“That was very refreshing,” she said. “Where shall I find the
+street-car? I walked out, but it is late.”
+
+“I'll take you to the car.” Peter picked up his old hat.
+
+“Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the
+conductors double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how can
+they when it is the wrong car?” She bowed to Harmony without shaking
+hands. “Thank you for the tea. It was really good. Where do you get it?”
+
+“There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel.”
+
+“I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye.”
+
+Not a word about the lessons or the American child!
+
+“You said something about my card in the Doctors' Club--”
+
+Something wistful in the girl's eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.
+
+After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand and her
+voice was not so hard.
+
+“That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social visit
+and we'll not spoil it with business.”
+
+“But--”
+
+“I really think the boy's mother must attend to that herself. But I
+shall tell her where to find you, and”--here she glanced at Peter--“all
+about it.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Harmony gratefully.
+
+Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and through
+the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind them he turned
+and faced her:--
+
+“You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The result
+was a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She drew her ample
+proportions into a dignity that was almost majesty.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I--I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without
+foundation.”
+
+“I am glad of that.” There was no conviction in her voice.
+
+“Of course,” went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony's sake, “I
+suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is not a young
+woman by any means, and she takes very good care of Miss Wells. There
+were reasons why this seemed the best thing to do. Miss Wells was alone
+and--”
+
+“There is a Dr. Gates?”
+
+“Of course. If you will come back and wait she'll be along very soon.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced that
+there might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the situation was
+anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in that she had lost the
+anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a piece of her mind. She walked
+along beside him without speaking until they reached the street-car
+line. Then she turned.
+
+“You called her--you spoke to her very affectionately, young man,” she
+accused him.
+
+Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some
+perversion of humor seized him.
+
+“My dear Mrs. Boyer,” he said, “that was in jest purely. Besides, I did
+not know that you were there!”
+
+Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged American
+womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and settled its
+broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the cane seat. It was
+outraged American womanhood that flung open the door of Marie Jedlicka's
+flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka's sitting room confronted her
+husband as he read a month-old newspaper from home.
+
+“Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?” she demanded.
+
+Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned to
+meet domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good humor, or at
+the most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.
+
+“I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided.”
+
+“Dr. Gates--Anna Gates?”
+
+“There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I don't know
+their names.”
+
+“Where does Peter Byrne live?”
+
+“In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything to eat
+or do we sup of Peter Byrne?”
+
+Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom of Marie
+Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of the beds with the
+crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing about rooms. There was no
+change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie's tiny
+slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial
+house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it
+hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that
+soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that
+there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential
+qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not
+people? That when grandfather's wraith is seen in his old armchair it
+is the chair that produces it, while grandfather himself serenely haunts
+the shades of some vast wilderness of departed spirits?
+
+Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was
+exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where the most
+orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no attraction whatever in
+the thing they are asked to believe. Mrs. Boyer, who would have regarded
+it as heterodox to substitute any other instrument for the harp of her
+expectation, tied on her gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka's mirror,
+and thought of Harmony and of the girls at home.
+
+She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less shocked
+than she had expected.
+
+“It's not your affair or mine,” he said. “It's Byrne's business.”
+
+“Think of the girl!”
+
+“Even if you are right it's rather late, isn't it?”
+
+“You could tell him what you think of him.”
+
+Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living with a
+representative male had never taught his wife the reserves among members
+of the sex masculine.
+
+“I might, but I don't intend to,” he said. “And if you listen to me
+you'll keep the thing to yourself.”
+
+“I'll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils,” snapped
+Mrs. Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.
+
+We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand painful
+steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked soul. The soul
+was Harmony's; the foot--was it not encased at that moment in Mrs.
+Boyer's comfortable house shoes?
+
+Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on her car,
+went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat, and with the
+sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too indignant to be cold. He
+ran up the staircase, hearing on all sides the creaking and banging with
+which the old house resented a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria
+Theresa.
+
+Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her face
+hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when he entered.
+Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She quivered under it
+and he took it away.
+
+“Crying?”
+
+“A little,” very smothered. “Just dis-disappointment. Don't mind me,
+Peter.”
+
+“You mean about the pupil?”
+
+Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now more than
+ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had stained her cheek.
+She looked rather hectic, very lovely.
+
+“Why did she change so when she saw you?”
+
+Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might have
+said, safe things. Not one came to him.
+
+“She--she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry,” he said gravely.
+
+“She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“But Anna?”
+
+“She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters,” he added
+hastily. “I'll make Anna go to her and explain. It's her infernal
+jumping to a conclusion that makes me crazy.”
+
+“She will talk, Peter. I am frightened.”
+
+“I'll take Anna to-night and we'll go to Boyer's. I'll make that woman
+get down on her knees to you. I'll--”
+
+“You'll make bad very much worse,” said Harmony dejectedly. “When a
+thing has to be explained it does no good to explain it.”
+
+The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As in the
+dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the compelling influence
+of her nearness. He wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life
+before, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bid defiance to
+evil tongues. He was afraid of himself. To gain a moment he put a chair
+between them and stood, strong hands gripping its back, looking down at
+her.
+
+“There is one thing we could do.”
+
+“What, Peter?”
+
+“We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it--it might not be
+so bad for you.”
+
+“But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course, but--not that
+way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry.”
+
+“Not even if I wish it very much?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“If you are thinking of my future--”
+
+“I'm thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you care
+a little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are lonely and I
+am the only person you see much, so you think you want to marry me. You
+don't really. You want to help me.”
+
+Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny his
+altruism.
+
+And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer, compared
+with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the compelling motive
+after all, his need of her.
+
+“It would be a rotten match for you,” he agreed. “I only thought,
+perhaps--You are right, of course; you ought not to marry.”
+
+“And what about you?”
+
+“I ought not, of course.”
+
+Harmony rose, smiling a little.
+
+“Then that's settled. And for goodness' sake, Peter, stop proposing to
+me every time things go wrong.” Her voice changed, grew grave and older,
+much older than Peter's. “We must not marry, either of us, Peter. Anna
+is right. There might be an excuse if we were very much in love: but we
+are not. And loneliness is not a reason.”
+
+“I am very lonely,” said Peter wistfully.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning and
+approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere of mystery
+that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a good night and
+having taken the morning's medicine without argument, had been allowed
+up in a roller chair. It struck Peter with a pang that the boy looked
+more frail day by day, more transparent.
+
+“I have brought you,” said Peter gravely, “the cod-liver oil.”
+
+“I've had it!”
+
+“Then guess.”
+
+“Dad's letter?”
+
+“You've just had one. Don't be a piggy.”
+
+“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
+
+“Vegetable,” said Peter shamelessly.
+
+“Soft or hard!”
+
+“Soft.”
+
+This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be vegetable;
+they could hardly be soft.
+
+“A kitten?”
+
+“A kitten is not vegetable, James.”
+
+“I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!” For by this time Harmony was his
+very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which consisted of Nurse
+Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna and Peter, and of course
+the sentry, who did not know that he belonged.
+
+“Gelatin, to be sure,” replied Peter, and produced the horns.
+
+It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row of
+beds, its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if to add a
+touch of completeness the sentry outside, peering in, saw the wheeled
+chair with its occupant, and celebrated this advance along the road to
+recovery by placing on the window-ledge a wooden replica of himself,
+bayonet and all, carved from a bit of cigar box.
+
+“Everybody is very nice to me,” said Jimmy contentedly. “When my father
+comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who are kind to
+me. There was a woman on the ship--What is bulging your pocket, Peter?”
+
+“My handkerchief.”
+
+“That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief.”
+
+Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood
+up before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward watched joyously,
+while from pocket after pocket of Peter's old gray suit came Jimmy's
+salvage--two nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout
+colonel of hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier
+waiting to go through the various salutations due his rank before
+assisting him. A gala day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the
+little mountain town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if
+one did not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands
+soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was
+much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her
+almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the chair into the smooth
+white bed.
+
+He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of the deer
+beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping
+guard. As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet
+beckoning to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the
+sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the room. Just outside, round a
+corner, was the Dozent's laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where
+he slept, where on a stand was the photograph of the lady he would marry
+when he had become a professor and required no one's consent.
+
+The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which
+kept the boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with Austrian
+intrigue had made him invaluable. He it was who had originated the idea
+of making Jimmy responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly
+Trager quarreling over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or
+brawling over his soup with another patient, was likely to be hailed in
+a thin soprano, and to stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in
+mixed English and German, restored the decorum of the ward. They were a
+quarrelsome lot, the convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling
+disputes and awarding decisions that he slept almost all night. This was
+as it should be.
+
+The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white coat,
+stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous. He held out
+a letter.
+
+“This has come for the child,” he said in quite good English. He was
+obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans
+who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with
+which some day he would marry. He liked the English language; he liked
+Americans because they learned quickly. He held out an envelope with a
+black border and Peter took it.
+
+“From Paris!” he said. “Who in the world--I suppose I'd better open it.”
+
+“So I thought. It appears a letter of--how you say it? Ah, yes,
+condolence.”
+
+Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave it open
+to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent
+read it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of
+sugar. Peter's face was very sober.
+
+“So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?”
+
+“Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a
+baby--went on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her, which
+is a good thing. She seems to have been a bad lot.”
+
+“She comes to take him away. That is impossible.”
+
+“Of course it is impossible,” said Peter savagely. “She's not going
+to see the child if I can help it. She left because--she's the boy's
+mother, but that's the best you can say of her. This letter--Well,
+you've read it.”
+
+“She is as a stranger to him?”
+
+“Absolutely. She will come in mourning--look at that black border--and
+tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the type.”
+
+The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched,
+as does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the gushing letter in
+his hand and thought fiercely.
+
+“She is on her way here,” said the Dozent. “That is bad. Paris to Wien
+is two days and a night. She may hourly arrive.”
+
+“We might send him away--to another hospital.”
+
+The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Had I a home--” he said, and glanced through the door to the portrait
+on the stand. “It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for a
+time. In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a
+fit person the boy could be given to her. It is, of course, an affair of
+police.”
+
+This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
+imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail. He read
+the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy's mother,
+and failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy slept. A burly
+convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general
+appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up
+the blanket round the small shoulders.
+
+“I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day,” said the
+Dozent. “That gives us a few hours. She will go to the police, and
+to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time--”
+
+“In the mean time,” Peter replied, “I'll try to think of something. If I
+thought she could be warned and would leave him here--”
+
+“She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with him
+through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to be there
+for carnival, and the boy will die.”
+
+Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read it
+again in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from it. It spoke
+of the dead father coldly, and the father had been the boy's idol. No
+good woman could have been so heartless. It offered the boy a seat in
+one of the least reputable of the Paris theaters to hear his mother
+sing. And in the envelope, overlooked before, Peter found a cutting
+from a French newspaper, a picture of the music-hall type that made him
+groan. It was indorsed “Mamma.”
+
+Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in order,
+working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel--all in order but
+Peter's room. That was to have a special cleaning later. Next, still
+with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours with her violin, standing
+very close to the stove to save fuel and keep her fingers warm. She
+played well that morning: even her own critical ears were satisfied,
+and the Portier, repairing a window lock in an empty room below, was
+entranced. He sat on the window sill in the biting cold and listened.
+Many music students had lived in the apartment with the great salon;
+there had been much music of one sort and another, but none like this.
+
+“She tears my heart from my bosom,” muttered the Portier, sighing, and
+almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.
+
+After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter's room. She felt very tender
+toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer's visit had died
+away, but there remained a clear vision of Peter standing behind the
+chair and offering himself humbly in marriage, so that a bad situation
+might be made better. And as with a man tenderness expresses itself in
+the giving of gifts, so with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony
+cleaned Peter's room.
+
+It was really rather tidy. Peter's few belongings did not spread to any
+extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the rudiments of order.
+Harmony took the covers from washstand and dressing table and washed and
+ironed them. She cleaned Peter's worn brushes and brought a pincushion
+of her own for his one extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own
+steamer rug and folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove
+in the room; it had been Harmony's room once, and she knew to the full
+how cold it could be.
+
+Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for the
+inner. She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up, when Anna
+came home.
+
+Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came somberly
+back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was making fast that
+day.
+
+“Hello, Harry,” she said. “I'm going to take a bite and hurry off. Don't
+bother, I'll attend to myself.” She stuffed the letter in her belt and
+got a plate from a shelf. “How pretty you look with your head tied up!
+If stupid Peter saw you now he would fall in love with you.”
+
+“Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!”
+
+Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt rather
+better after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off, was busy over
+the brick stove. There was nothing said for a moment. Then:--
+
+“I am out of patience with Peter,” said Anna.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because he hasn't fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?”
+
+“Please, Anna!”
+
+“It's better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it's superhuman of
+Peter. I wonder--”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I think I'll not tell you what I wonder.”
+
+And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna's frank speech, did not insist.
+
+As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna's thoughts
+wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt and back again
+to Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been suspicious of Peter.
+From her dozen years of advantage in age and experience she looked down
+on Peter's thirty years of youth, and thought she knew something that
+Peter himself did not suspect. Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his
+heart-searching for him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony
+and did not himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup,
+revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and grace, a
+thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility she and Peter had
+assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for her letter.
+
+“I've had rather bad news,” she said at last.
+
+“From home?”
+
+“Yes. My father--did you know I have a father?”
+
+“You hadn't spoken of him.”
+
+“I never do. As a father he hasn't amounted to much. But he's very ill,
+and--I 've a conscience.”
+
+Harmony turned a startled face to her.
+
+“You are not going back to America?”
+
+“Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and do go
+I'll find some one to take my place. Don't worry.”
+
+The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came in, and
+there was no time to discuss Peter's new complication with her. Harmony
+and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent. Anna's unfortunate
+comment about Peter had made her constrained. After the meal Peter, pipe
+in mouth, carried the dishes to the kitchen, and there it was that he
+gave her the letter. What Peter's slower mind had been a perceptible
+time in grasping Harmony comprehended at once--and not only the
+situation, but its solution.
+
+“Don't let her have him!” she said, putting down the letter. “Bring him
+here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!”
+
+And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so obvious
+was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and estrays, banded
+together against a common poverty, a common loneliness, should share
+without question whatever was theirs to divide. Peter and Anna gave
+cheerfully of their substance, Harmony of her labor, that a small boy
+should be saved a tragic knowledge until he was well enough to bear it,
+or until, if God so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.
+
+The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind.
+Thus it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials
+of the Votivkirche showed nine o'clock, he did not notice a cab that
+halted across the street from the hospital.
+
+Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of
+him, carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and
+insisting on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to
+say that he had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that
+it was a short stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was
+undoubtedly clothing going to the laundry.
+
+Perhaps--it is just possible--the sentry had his suspicions. It is
+undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with Peter's arm
+close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going
+through the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing
+toward the carriage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg
+sulked behind walls of mist. From the little balcony of the Pension
+Waldheim one looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there
+by islands that were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were
+evergreen trees. The roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the
+horses steamed and sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the
+barking of a dog loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be
+seen. Children cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
+
+During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain
+with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain
+clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the
+slip.
+
+Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close the
+heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the room was
+sticky and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined to the
+house, grew irritable.
+
+Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender
+tenure she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither speech nor
+thought. And the little Marie's love for Stewart, grown to be a part of
+her, was largely maternal. She held him by mothering him, by keeping him
+comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have
+brought him to her in chains.
+
+And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement; he
+resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her unusual
+leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire,
+and stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious
+thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.
+
+On the night of the second day the weather changed. Marie, awakening
+early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the door carefully
+behind her. A new world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering
+branches, of white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe was
+become a garment. And from behind the villa came the cheerful sound of
+sleigh-bells, of horses' feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily
+along frozen roads. Even the barking of the dog in the next yard had
+ceased rumbling and become sharp staccato.
+
+The balcony extended round the corner of the house. Marie, eagerly
+discovering her new world, peered about, and seeing no one near ventured
+so far. The road was in view, and a small girl on ski was struggling to
+prevent a collision between two plump feet. Even as Marie saw her the
+inevitable happened and she went headlong into a drift. A governess who
+had been kneeling before a shrine by the road hastily crossed herself
+and ran to the rescue.
+
+It was a marvelous morning, a day of days. The governess and the child
+went on out of vision. Marie stood still, looking at the shrine. A drift
+had piled about its foot, where the governess had placed a bunch of
+Alpine flowers. Down on her knees on the balcony went the little
+Marie, regardless of the snow, and prayed to the shrine of the Virgin
+below--for what? For forgiveness? For a better life? Not at all. She
+prayed that the heels of the American girl would keep her in out of the
+snow.
+
+The prayer of the wicked availeth nothing; even the godly at times must
+suffer disappointment. And when one prays of heels, who can know of
+the yearning back of the praying? Marie, rising and dusting her chilled
+knees, saw the party of Americans on the road, clad in stout boots
+and swinging along gayly. Marie shrugged her shoulders resignedly. She
+should have gone to the shrine itself; a balcony was not a holy
+place. But one thing she determined--the Americans went toward the
+Sonnwendstein. She would advise against the Sonnwendstein for that day.
+
+Marie's day of days had begun wrong after all. For Stewart rose with the
+Sonnwendstein in his mind, and no suggestion of Marie's that in another
+day a path would be broken had any effect on him. He was eager to be
+off, committed the extravagance of ordering an egg apiece for breakfast,
+and finally proclaimed that if Marie feared the climb he would go alone.
+
+Marie made many delays: she dressed slowly, and must run back to see
+if the balcony door was securely closed. At a little shop where they
+stopped to buy mountain sticks she must purchase postcards and send them
+at once. Stewart was fairly patient: air and exercise were having their
+effect.
+
+It was eleven o'clock when, having crossed the valley, they commenced to
+mount the slope of the Sonnwendstein. The climb was easy; the road wound
+back and forward on itself so that one ascended with hardly an effort.
+Stewart gave Marie a hand here and there, and even paused to let her
+sit on a boulder and rest. The snow was not heavy; he showed her the
+footprints of a party that had gone ahead, and to amuse her tried
+to count the number of people. When he found it was five he grew
+thoughtful. There were five in Anita's party. Thanks to Marie's delays
+they met the Americans coming down. The meeting was a short one: the
+party went on down, gayly talking. Marie and Stewart climbed silently.
+Marie's day was spoiled; Stewart had promised to dine at the hotel.
+
+Even the view at the tourist house did not restore Marie's fallen
+spirits. What were the Vienna plain and the Styrian Alps to her, with
+this impatient and frowning man beside her consulting his watch and
+computing the time until he might see the American again? What was
+prayer, if this were its answer?
+
+They descended rapidly, Stewart always in the lead and setting a pace
+that Marie struggled in vain to meet. To her tentative and breathless
+remarks he made brief answer, and only once in all that time did he
+volunteer a remark. They had reached the Hotel Erzherzog in the valley.
+The hotel was still closed, and Marie, panting, sat down on an edge of
+the terrace.
+
+“We have been very foolish,” he said.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Being seen together like that.”
+
+“But why? Could you not walk with any woman?”
+
+“It's not that,” said Stewart hastily. “I suppose once does not matter.
+But we can't be seen together all the time.”
+
+Marie turned white. The time had gone by when an incident of the sort
+could have been met with scorn or with threats; things had changed
+for Marie Jedlicka since the day Peter had refused to introduce her to
+Harmony. Then it had been vanity; now it was life itself.
+
+“What you mean,” she said with pale lips, “is that we must not be seen
+together at all. Must I--do you wish me to remain a prisoner while
+you--” she choked.
+
+“For Heaven's sake,” he broke out brutally, “don't make a scene. There
+are men cutting ice over there. Of course you are not a prisoner. You
+may go where you like.”
+
+Marie rose and picked up her muff.
+
+Marie's sordid little tragedy played itself out in Semmering. Stewart
+neglected her almost completely; he took fewer and fewer meals at the
+villa. In two weeks he spent one evening with the girl, and was so
+irritable that she went to bed crying. The little mountain resort was
+filling up; there were more and more Americans. Christmas was drawing
+near and a dozen or so American doctors came up, bringing their families
+for the holidays. It was difficult to enter a shop without encountering
+some of them. To add to the difficulty, the party at the hotel, finding
+it crowded there, decided to go into a pension and suggested moving to
+the Waldheim.
+
+Stewart himself was wretchedly uncomfortable. Marie's tragedy was his
+predicament. He disliked himself very cordially, loathing himself and
+his situation with the new-born humility of the lover. For Stewart was
+in love for the first time in his life. Marie knew it. She had not lived
+with him for months without knowing his every thought, every mood. She
+grew bitter and hard those days, sitting alone by the green stove in
+the Pension Waldheim, or leaning, elbows on the rail, looking from the
+balcony over the valley far below. Bitter and hard, that is, during his
+absences; he had but to enter the room and her rage died, to be
+replaced with yearning and little, shy, tentative advances that he only
+tolerated. Wild thoughts came to Marie, especially at night, when the
+stars made a crown over the Rax, and in the hotel an orchestra played,
+while people dined and laughed and loved.
+
+She grew obstinate, too. When in his desperation Stewart suggested that
+they go back to Vienna she openly scoffed.
+
+“Why?” she demanded. “That you may come back here to her, leaving me
+there?”
+
+“My dear girl,” he flung back exasperated, “this affair was not a
+permanent one. You knew that at the start.”
+
+“You have taken me away from my work. I have two months' vacation. It is
+but one month.”
+
+“Go back and let me pay--”
+
+“No!”
+
+In pursuance of the plan to leave the hotel the American party came to
+see the Waldheim, and catastrophe almost ensued. Luckily Marie was on
+the balcony when the landlady flung open the door, and announced it as
+Stewart's apartment. But Stewart had a bad five minutes and took it out,
+manlike, on the girl.
+
+Stewart had another reason for not wishing to leave Semmering. Anita
+was beautiful, a bit of a coquette, too; as are most pretty women. And
+Stewart was not alone in his devotion. A member of the party, a New
+Yorker named Adam, was much in love with the girl and indifferent who
+knew it. Stewart detested him.
+
+In his despair Stewart wrote to Peter Byrne. It was characteristic of
+Peter that, however indifferent people might be in prosperity, they
+always turned to him in trouble. Stewart's letter concluded:--
+
+“I have made out a poor case for myself; but I'm in a hole, as you can
+see. I would like to chuck everything here and sail for home with these
+people who go in January. But, confound it, Byrne, what am I to do with
+Marie? And that brings me to what I 've been wanting to say all along,
+and haven't had the courage to. Marie likes you and you rather liked
+her, didn't you? You could talk her into reason if anybody could. Now
+that you know how things are, can't you come up over Sunday? It's asking
+a lot, and I know it; but things are pretty bad.”
+
+Peter received the letter on the morning of the day before Christmas. He
+read it several times and, recalling the look he had seen more than once
+in Marie Jedlicka's eyes, he knew that things were very bad, indeed.
+
+But Peter was a man of family in those days, and Christmas is a family
+festival not to be lightly ignored. He wired to Stewart that he would
+come up as soon as possible after Christmas. Then, because of the look
+in Marie's eyes and because he feared for her a sad Christmas, full of
+heartaches and God knows what loneliness, he bought her a most hideous
+brooch, which he thought admirable in every way and highly ornamental
+and which he could not afford at all. This he mailed, with a cheery
+greeting, and feeling happier and much poorer made his way homeward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with the
+great chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with cranberry eyes
+for supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree gleaming with candles on
+the stand, and beside the stand, in a huge chair, Jimmy!
+
+It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had been
+shopping and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless, with the
+shops full of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly overburdened.
+There had been anxieties, too, such as the pig's head, which must be
+done a certain way, and Jimmy, who must be left with the Portier's wife
+as nurse while all of them went to the hospital. The house revolved
+around Jimmy now, Jimmy, who seemed the better for the moving, and whose
+mother as yet had failed to materialize.
+
+In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as the
+early twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry kept
+guard and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground men
+wandered about, smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving to
+keep warm, offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, with
+here and there an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home.
+The hospital was always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she
+found it harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be so
+much suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful, insupportable.
+Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital in festivity is very
+affecting. It smiles through its tears. And in every assemblage there
+are sharply defined lines of difference. There are those who are going
+home soon, God willing; there are those who will go home some time after
+long days and longer nights. And there are those who will never go home
+and who know it. And because of this the ones who are never going home
+are most festively clad, as if, by way of compensation, the nurses
+mean to give them all future Christmasses in one. They receive an
+extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,--and they are not the less
+grateful because they understand. And when everything is over they lay
+away in the bedside stand the gloves they will never wear, and divide
+the extra orange with a less fortunate one who is almost recovered.
+Their last Christmas is past.
+
+“How beautiful the tree was!” they say. Or, “Did you hear how the
+children sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think--of
+angels.”
+
+Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,
+and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was to
+play. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon;
+no one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the
+nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.
+Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and
+wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
+imposing audience was the result.
+
+Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats
+rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the
+roof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other
+illumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the
+rows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white
+gowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with
+the red beard stepped out and began to read an address--all caught
+Harmony by the throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt
+rather than heard her soft sob.
+
+Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through
+Harmony's eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away,
+leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of
+humanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be
+counted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early days, when a heart
+was not a pump, but a thing that ached or thrilled or struggled, that
+loved or hated or yearned.
+
+The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning
+festivity into gloom. It played Handel's “Largo”; it threw its whole
+soul into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor
+place, that Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep
+vibration of the cello. Harmony fidgeted.
+
+“How terrible!” she whispered. “To turn their Christmas-Eve into
+mourning! Stop them!”
+
+“Stop a German orchestra?”
+
+“They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!”
+
+The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed
+recitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the
+patients. Then--Harmony.
+
+Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous,
+she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the
+candles burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a
+white coat asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to
+her accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at
+first timidly, then lustily.
+
+Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the applause.
+Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought Peter's, and
+finding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as
+softly the others sang.
+
+“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,”--they sang, with upturned eyes.
+
+“Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht...”
+
+Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in
+which his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a
+Christmas-Eve in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a girl-woman,
+of a still and holy night, of a child.
+
+“Nur das traute, hoch heilige Paar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar Schlaf'
+in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh',” they sang.
+
+There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that night.
+
+Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room, which
+had been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with
+a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony
+brought her small puzzles and together they solved them.
+
+“Shall it be a steak to-night?” thus Harmony humbly. “Or chops?”
+
+“With tomato sauce?”
+
+“If Peter allows, yes.”
+
+Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:--
+
+“Fish,” he would decide. “Fish with egg dressing.”
+
+They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.
+
+The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement,
+but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many and bitter were the
+battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the
+litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.
+
+The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully
+calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on
+which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as
+a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for
+Peter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those
+days. He resented anything that took him from them.
+
+There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was
+failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones
+be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's
+great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built
+his house on the sand, indeed.
+
+So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.
+Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote letters of marvelous
+adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured
+them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of
+his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. “Dad” was
+already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes
+he called Peter “Dad.” At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an
+agony of tenderness.
+
+And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
+Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the
+privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All
+day he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for
+the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming
+only, and sternly forbidden to eat.
+
+A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, with
+a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a
+pair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage was
+on his knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake
+with pink icing. The Portier's gift was a stealthy one, while his wife
+was having coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of
+Christmas does strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was
+roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the
+Portier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that
+only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there was
+a picture of the Christ-Child within.
+
+Young McLean came to call that evening--came to call and remained to
+worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor had
+come. McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, was
+a comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments since
+the day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the hallmark of respectability on
+the household, to restore it to something it had lost or had never had.
+
+She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna put Jimmy
+to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was extinguishing
+the dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean was at the piano,
+thrumming softly. Peter, turning round suddenly, surprised an expression
+on the younger man's face that startled him.
+
+For that one night Harmony had laid aside her mourning, and wore white,
+soft white, tucked in at the neck, short-sleeved, trailing. Peter had
+never seen her in white before.
+
+It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were always
+alert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night he was
+unusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp and watched
+the two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or that, the girl
+bending over a string of her violin. Anna came in and sat down near him.
+
+“The boy is quite fascinated,” she whispered. “Watch his eyes!”
+
+“He is a nice boy.” This from Peter, as if he argued with himself.
+
+“As men go!” This was a challenge Peter was usually quick to accept.
+That night he only smiled. “It would be a good thing for her: his people
+are wealthy.”
+
+Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem. Eminently
+it would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in his well-made
+evening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language of music, who was
+almost speechless over her playing, and who looked up at her with eyes
+in which admiration was not unmixed with adoration.
+
+Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the room and
+took to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each time as he passed
+the door he tried not to glance in; each time he paused involuntarily.
+Jealousy had her will of him that night, jealousy, when he had never
+acknowledged even to himself how much the girl was to him.
+
+Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but that
+night he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the doors. Peter
+came in and sat with him in the dark, going over now and then to cover
+him, or to give him a drink, or to pick up the cage of mice which Jimmy
+insisted on having beside him and which constantly slipped off on to the
+floor. After a time Peter lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on a
+cork floating in a saucer of lard oil, and set it on the bedside table.
+Then round it he arranged Jimmy's treasures, the deer antlers, the cage
+of mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat in
+the room, his dead pipe in his teeth, and thought of many things.
+
+It was very late when young McLean left. The two had played until they
+stopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to bed. From
+Jimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their voices.
+
+“You have been awfully good to me,” McLean said as he finally rose to
+go. “I--I want you to know that I'll never forget this evening, never.”
+
+“It has been splendid, hasn't it? Since little Scatchy left there has
+been no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for some one to
+talk music to.”
+
+Lonely! Poor Peter!
+
+“Then you will let me come back?”
+
+“Will I, indeed! I--I'll be grateful.”
+
+“How soon would be proper? I dare say to-morrow you'll be
+busy--Christmas and all that.”
+
+“Do you mean you would like to come to-morrow?”
+
+“If old Peter wouldn't be fussed. He might think--”
+
+“Peter always wants every one to be happy. So if you really care--”
+
+“And I'll not bore you?”
+
+“Rather not!”
+
+“How--about what time?”
+
+“In the afternoon would be pleasant, I think. And then Jimmy can listen.
+He loves music.”
+
+McLean, having found his fur-lined coat, got into it as slowly as
+possible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in all
+the dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even then he
+hesitated, lingered, loath to break up this little world of two.
+
+“You play wonderfully,” he said.
+
+“So do you.”
+
+“If only something comes of it! It's curious, isn't it, when you think
+of it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and both of us
+working our heads off for something that may never pan out.”
+
+There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not until
+after young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was almost word for
+word what Peter had said to her in the coffee-house the night they met.
+She thought it very curious, the coincidence, and pondered it, being
+ignorant of the fact that it is always a matter for wonder when the
+man meets the woman, no matter where. Nothing is less curious, more
+inevitable, more amazing. “You and I,” forsooth, said Peter!
+
+“You and I,” cried young McLean!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Quite suddenly Peter's house, built on the sand, collapsed. The shock
+came on Christmas-Day, after young McLean, now frankly infatuated, had
+been driven home by Peter.
+
+Peter did it after his own fashion. Harmony, with unflagging enthusiasm,
+was looking tired. Suggestions to this effect rolled off McLean's back
+like rain off a roof. Finally Peter gathered up the fur-lined coat, the
+velours hat, gloves, and stick, and placed them on the piano in front of
+the younger man.
+
+“I'm sorry you must go,” said Peter calmly, “but, as you say, Miss Wells
+is tired and there is supper to be eaten. Don't let me hurry you.”
+
+The Portier was at the door as McLean, laughing and protesting, went
+out. He brought a cablegram for Anna. Peter took it to her door and
+waited uneasily while she read it.
+
+It was an urgent summons home; the old father was very low. He was
+calling for her, and a few days or week' would see the end. There were
+things that must be looked after. The need of her was imperative.
+With the death the old man's pension would cease and Anna was the
+bread-winner.
+
+Anna held the paper out to Peter and sat down. Her nervous strength
+seemed to have deserted her. All at once she was a stricken, elderly
+woman, with hope wiped out of her face and something nearer resentment
+than grief in its place.
+
+“It has come, Peter,” she said dully. “I always knew it couldn't last.
+They've always hung about my neck, and now--”
+
+“Do you think you must go? Isn't there some way? If things are so bad
+you could hardly get there in time, and--you must think of yourself a
+little, Anna.”
+
+“I am not thinking of anything else. Peter, I'm an uncommonly selfish
+woman, but I--”
+
+Quite without warning she burst out crying, unlovely, audible weeping
+that shook her narrow shoulders. Harmony heard the sound and joined
+them. After a look at Anna she sat down beside her and put a white
+arm over her shoulders. She did not try to speak. Anna's noisy grief
+subsided as suddenly as it came. She patted Harmony's hand in mute
+acknowledgment and dried her eyes.
+
+“I'm not grieving, child,” she said; “I'm only realizing what a selfish
+old maid I am. I'm crying because I'm a disappointment to myself. Harry,
+I'm going back to America.”
+
+And that, after hours of discussion, was where they ended. Anna must go
+at once. Peter must keep the apartment, having Jimmy to look after and
+to hide. What was a frightful dilemma to him and to Harmony Anna took
+rather lightly.
+
+“You'll find some one else to take my place,” she said. “If I had a day
+I could find a dozen.”
+
+“And in the interval?” Harmony asked, without looking at Peter.
+
+“The interval! Tut! Peter is your brother, to all intents and purposes.
+And if you are thinking of scandal-mongers, who will know?”
+
+Having determined to go, no arguments moved Anna, nor could either of
+the two think of anything to urge beyond a situation she refused to
+see, or rather a situation she refused to acknowledge. She was not as
+comfortable as she pretended. During all that long night, while snow
+sifted down into the ugly yard and made it beautiful, while Jimmy slept
+and the white mice played, while Harmony tossed and tried to sleep and
+Peter sat in his cold room and smoked his pipe, Anna packed her untidy
+belongings and added a name now and then to a list that was meant
+for Peter, a list of possible substitutes for herself in the little
+household.
+
+She left early the next morning, a grim little person who bent over the
+sleeping boy hungrily, and insisted on carrying her own bag down the
+stairs. Harmony did not go to the station, but stayed at home, pale and
+silent, hovering around against Jimmy's awakening and struggling against
+a feeling of panic. Not that she feared Peter or herself. But she
+was conventional; shielded girls are accustomed to lean for a certain
+support on the proprieties, as bridgeplayers depend on rules.
+
+Peter came back to breakfast, but ate little. Harmony did not even sit
+down, but drank her cup of coffee standing, looking down at the snow
+below. Jimmy still slept.
+
+“Won't you sit down?” said Peter.
+
+“I'm not hungry, thank you.”
+
+“You can sit down without eating.”
+
+Peter was nervous. To cover his uneasiness he was distinctly gruff. He
+pulled a chair out for her and she sat down. Now that they were face
+to face the tension was lessened. Peter laid Anna's list on the table
+between them and bent over it toward her.
+
+“You are hurting me very much, Harry,” he said. “Do you know why?”
+
+“I? I am only sorry about Anna. I miss her. I--I was fond of her.”
+
+“So was I. But that isn't it, Harry. It's something else.”
+
+“I'm uncomfortable, Peter.”
+
+“So am I. I'm sorry you don't trust me. For that's it.”
+
+“Not at all. But, Peter, what will people say?”
+
+“A great deal, if they know. Who is to know? How many people know about
+us? A handful, at the most, McLean and Mrs. Boyer and one or two others.
+Of course I can go away until we get some one to take Anna's place, but
+you'd be here alone at night, and if the youngster had an attack--”
+
+“Oh, no, don't leave him!”
+
+“It's holiday time. There are no clinics until next week. If you'll put
+up with me--”
+
+“Put up with you, when it is your apartment I use, your food I eat!” She
+almost choked. “Peter, I must talk about money.”
+
+“I'm coming to that. Don't you suppose you more than earn everything?
+Doesn't it humiliate me hourly to see you working here?”
+
+“Peter! Would you rob me of my last vestige of self-respect?”
+
+This being unanswerable, Peter fell back on his major premise.
+
+“If you'll put up with me for a day or so I'll take this list of Anna's
+and hunt up some body. Just describe the person you desire and I'll find
+her.” He assumed a certainty he was far from feeling, but it reassured
+the girl. “A woman, of course?”
+
+“Of course. And not young.”
+
+“'Not young,'” wrote Peter. “Fat?”
+
+Harmony recalled Mrs. Boyer's ample figure and shook her head.
+
+“Not too stout. And agreeable. That's most important.”
+
+“'Agreeable,'” wrote Peter. “Although Anna was hardly agreeable, in the
+strict sense of the word, was she?”
+
+“She was interesting, and--and human.”
+
+“'Human!'” wrote Peter. “Wanted, a woman, not young, not too stout,
+agreeable and human. Shall I advertise?”
+
+The strain was quite gone by that time. Harmony was smiling. Jimmy,
+waking, called for food, and the morning of the first day was under way.
+
+Peter was well content that morning, in spite of an undercurrent of
+uneasiness. Before this Anna had shared his proprietorship with him. Now
+the little household was his. His vicarious domesticity pleased him. He
+strutted about, taking a new view of his domain; he tightened a doorknob
+and fastened a noisy window. He inspected the coal-supply and grumbled
+over its quality. He filled the copper kettle on the stove, carried
+in the water for Jimmy's morning bath, cleaned the mouse cage. He even
+insisted on peeling the little German potatoes, until Harmony cried
+aloud at his wastefulness and took the knife from him.
+
+And afterward, while Harmony in the sickroom read aloud and Jimmy put
+the wooden sentry into the cage to keep order, he got out his books and
+tried to study. But he did little work. His book lay on his knee, his
+pipe died beside him. The strangeness of the situation came over him,
+sitting there, and left him rather frightened. He tried to see it
+from the viewpoint of an outsider, and found himself incredulous and
+doubting. McLean would resent the situation. Even the Portier was a
+person to reckon with. The skepticism of the American colony was a thing
+to fear and avoid.
+
+And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just manage
+alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his resources
+to cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had undertaken to
+shield a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he would and could.
+
+Brave thoughts were Peter's that snowy morning in the great salon of
+Maria Theresa, with the cat of the Portier purring before the fire;
+brave thoughts, cool reason, with Harmony practicing scales very softly
+while Jimmy slept, and with Anna speeding through a white world, to the
+accompaniment of bitter meditation.
+
+Peter had meant to go to Semmering that day, but even the urgency of
+Marie's need faded before his own situation. He wired Stewart that he
+would come as soon as he could, and immediately after lunch departed for
+the club, Anna's list in his pocket, Harmony's requirements in mind. He
+paused at Jimmy's door on his way out.
+
+“What shall it be to-day?” he inquired. “A postcard or a crayon?”
+
+“I wish I could have a dog.”
+
+“We'll have a dog when you are better and can take him walking. Wait
+until spring, son.”
+
+“Some more mice?”
+
+“You will have them--but not to-day.”
+
+“What holiday comes next?”
+
+“New Year's Day. Suppose I bring you a New Year's card.”
+
+“That's right,” agreed Jimmy. “One I can send to Dad. Do you think he
+will come back this year?” wistfully.
+
+Peter dropped on his baggy knees beside the bed and drew the little
+wasted figure to him.
+
+“I think you'll surely see him this year, old man,” he said huskily.
+
+Peter walked to the Doctors' Club. On the way he happened on little
+Georgiev, the Bulgarian, and they went on together. Peter managed to
+make out that Georgiev was studying English, and that he desired to know
+the state of health and the abode of the Fraulein Wells. Peter evaded
+the latter by the simple expedient of pretending not to understand. The
+little Bulgarian watched him earnestly, his smouldering eyes not without
+suspicion. There had been much talk in the Pension Schwarz about the
+departure together of the three Americans. The Jew from Galicia still
+raved over Harmony's beauty.
+
+Georgiev rather hoped, by staying by Peter, to be led toward his star.
+But Peter left him at the Doctors' Club, still amiable, but absolutely
+obtuse to the question nearest the little spy's heart.
+
+The club was almost deserted. The holidays had taken many of the members
+out of town. Other men were taking advantage of the vacation to see the
+city, or to make acquaintance again with families they had hardly seen
+during the busy weeks before Christmas. The room at the top of the
+stairs where the wives of the members were apt to meet for chocolate and
+to exchange the addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room
+he found McLean. Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary
+habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for a
+dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to enlist McLean's assistance in his
+difficulties. McLean knew a good many people. He was popular,
+goodlooking, and in a colony where, unlike London and Paris, the great
+majority were people of moderate means, he was conspicuously well
+off. But he was also much younger than Peter and intolerant with the
+insolence of youth. Peter was thinking hard as he took off his overcoat
+and ordered beer.
+
+The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as he
+saw many things. How far his love might carry him, Peter had no idea. It
+seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and studied him over
+his magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly the girl's position, and
+that when he learned it a crisis might be precipitated.
+
+One of three things might happen: He might bend all his energies to
+second Peter's effort to fill Anna's place, to find the right person; he
+might suggest taking Anna's place himself, and insist that his presence
+in the apartment would be as justifiable as Peter's; or he might do at
+once the thing Peter felt he would do eventually, cut the knot of
+the difficulty by asking Harmony to marry him. Peter, greeting him
+pleasantly, decided not to tell him anything, to keep him away if
+possible until the thing was straightened out, and to wait for an hour
+at the club in the hope that a solution might stroll in for chocolate
+and gossip.
+
+In any event explanation to McLean would have required justification.
+Peter disliked the idea. He could humble himself, if necessary, to a
+woman; he could admit his asininity in assuming the responsibility of
+Jimmy, for instance, and any woman worthy of the name, or worthy of
+living in the house with Harmony, would understand. But McLean was
+young, intolerant. He was more than that, though Peter, concealing from
+himself just what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival
+for what he had never claimed. But a rival the boy was. Peter, calmly
+reading a magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip of the
+fiercest jealousy. He turned pages automatically, to recall nothing of
+what he had read.
+
+McLean, sitting across from him, watched him surreptitiously. Big Peter,
+aggressively masculine, heavy of shoulder, direct of speech and eye, was
+to him the embodiment of all that a woman should desire in a man. He,
+too, was jealous, but humbly so. Unlike Peter he knew his situation, was
+young enough to glory in it. Shameless love is always young; with years
+comes discretion, perhaps loss of confidence. The Crusaders were youths,
+pursuing an idea to the ends of the earth and flaunting a lady's
+guerdon from spear or saddle-bow. The older men among them tucked the
+handkerchief or bit of a gauntleted glove under jerkin and armor near
+the heart, and flung to the air the guerdon of some light o' love.
+McLean would have shouted Harmony's name from the housetops. Peter did
+not acknowledge even to himself that he was in love with her.
+
+It occurred to McLean after a time that Peter being in the club, and
+Harmony being in all probability at home, it might be possible to see
+her alone for a few minutes. He had not intended to go back to the house
+in the Siebensternstrasse so soon after being peremptorily put out; he
+had come to the club with the intention of clinching his resolution with
+a game of cribbage. But fate was playing into his hands. There was no
+cribbage player round, and Peter himself sat across deeply immersed in a
+magazine. McLean rose, not stealthily, but without unnecessary noise.
+
+So far so good. Peter turned a page and went on reading. McLean
+sauntered to a window, hands in pockets. He even whistled a trifle,
+under his breath, to prove how very casual were his intentions. Still
+whistling, he moved toward the door. Peter turned another page, which
+was curiously soon to have read two columns of small type without
+illustrations.
+
+Once out in the hall McLean's movements gained aim and precision. He got
+his coat, hat and stick, flung the first over his arm and the second on
+his head, and--
+
+“Going out?” asked Peter calmly.
+
+“Yes, nothing to do here. I've read all the infernal old magazines until
+I'm sick of them.” Indignant, too, from his tone.
+
+“Walking?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Mind if I go with you?”
+
+“Not at all.”
+
+Peter, taking down his old overcoat from its hook, turned and caught the
+boy's eye. It was a swift exchange of glances, but illuminating--Peter's
+whimsical, but with a sort of grim determination; McLean's sheepish, but
+equally determined.
+
+“Rotten afternoon,” said McLean as they started for the stairs. “Half
+rain, half snow. Streets are ankle-deep.”
+
+“I'm not particularly keen about walking, but--I don't care for this
+tomb alone.”
+
+Nothing was further from McLean's mind than a walk with Peter that
+afternoon. He hesitated halfway down the upper flight.
+
+“You don't care for cribbage, do you?”
+
+“Don't know anything about it. How about pinochle?”
+
+They had both stopped, equally determined, equally hesitating.
+
+“Pinochle it is,” acquiesced McLean. “I was only going because there was
+nothing to do.”
+
+Things went very well for Peter that afternoon--up to a certain point.
+He beat McLean unmercifully, playing with cold deliberation. McLean
+wearied, fidgeted, railed at his luck. Peter played on grimly.
+
+The club filled up toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women, wives of
+members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather attentive before
+he met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted bow he gave her. And,
+finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one of the women on Anna's list.
+
+Peter, laying down pairs and marking up score, went over Harmony's
+requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a woman, not young,
+not too stout, agreeable and human. She was a large, almost bovinely
+placid person, not at all reminiscent of Anna. She was neat where Anna
+had been disorderly, well dressed and breezy against Anna's dowdiness
+and sharpness. Peter, having totaled the score, rose and looked down at
+McLean.
+
+“You're a nice lad,” he said, smiling. “Sometime I shall teach you the
+game.”
+
+“How about a lesson to-night in Seven-Star Street?”
+
+“To-night? Why, I'm sorry. We have an engagement for to-night.”
+
+The “we” was deliberate and cruel. McLean writhed. Also the statement
+was false, but the boy was spared that knowledge for the moment.
+
+Things went well. Dr. Jennings was badly off for quarters. She would
+make a change if she could better herself. Peter drew her off to a
+corner and stated his case. She listened attentively, albeit not without
+disapproval.
+
+She frankly discredited the altruism of Peter's motives when he told
+her about Harmony. But as the recital went on she found herself rather
+touched. The story of Jimmy appealed to her. She scolded and lauded
+Peter in one breath, and what was more to the point, she promised to
+visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse the next day.
+
+“So Anna Gates has gone home!” she reflected. “When?”
+
+“This morning.”
+
+“Then the girl is there alone?”
+
+“Yes. She is very young and inexperienced, and the boy--it's
+myocarditis. She's afraid to be left with him.”
+
+“Is she quite alone?”
+
+“Absolutely, and without funds, except enough for her lessons. Our
+arrangement was that she should keep the house going; that was her
+share.”
+
+Dr. Jennings was impressed. It was impossible to talk to Peter and not
+believe him. Women trusted Peter always.
+
+“You've been very foolish, Dr. Byrne,” she said as she rose; “but you've
+been disinterested enough to offset that and to put some of us to shame.
+To-morrow at three, if it suits you. You said the Siebensternstrasse?”
+
+Peter went home exultant.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Christmas-Day had had a softening effect on Mrs. Boyer. It had opened
+badly. It was the first Christmas she had spent away from her children,
+and there had been little of the holiday spirit in her attitude as she
+prepared the Christmas breakfast. After that, however, things happened.
+
+In the first place, under her plate she had found a frivolous chain and
+pendant which she had admired. And when her eyes filled up, as they did
+whenever she was emotionally moved, the doctor had come round the table
+and put both his arms about her.
+
+“Too young for you? Not a bit!” he said heartily. “You're better-looking
+then you ever were, Jennie; and if you weren't you're the only woman for
+me, anyhow. Don't you think I realize what this exile means to you and
+that you're doing it for me?”
+
+“I--I don't mind it.”
+
+“Yes, you do. To-night we'll go out and make a night of it, shall we?
+Supper at the Grand, the theater, and then the Tabarin, eh?”
+
+She loosened herself from his arms.
+
+“What shall I wear? Those horrible things the children bought me--”
+
+“Throw 'em away.”
+
+“They're not worn at all.”
+
+“Throw them out. Get rid of the things the children got you. Go out
+to-morrow and buy something you like--not that I don't like you in
+anything or without--”
+
+“Frank!”
+
+“Be happy, that's the thing. It's the first Christmas without the
+family, and I miss them too. But we're together, dear. That's the big
+thing. Merry Christmas.”
+
+An auspicious opening, that, to Christmas-Day. And they had carried
+out the program as outlined. Mrs. Boyer had enjoyed it, albeit a bit
+horrified at the Christmas gayety at the Tabarin.
+
+The next morning, however, she awakened with a keen reaction. Her head
+ached. She had a sense of taint over her. She was virtue rampant
+again, as on the day she had first visited the old lodge in the
+Siebensternstrasse.
+
+It is hardly astonishing that by association of ideas Harmony came
+into her mind again, a brand that might even yet be snatched from the
+burning. She had been a bit hasty before, she admitted to herself. There
+was a woman doctor named Gates, although her address at the club was
+given as Pension Schwarz. She determined to do her shopping early and
+then to visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard
+woman, for all her inflexible morality, and more than once she had
+had an uneasy memory of Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face
+the afternoon of her visit. She had been a watchful mother over a not
+particularly handsome family of daughters. This lovely young girl needed
+mothering and she had refused it. She would go back, and if she found
+she had been wrong and the girl was deserving and honest, she would see
+what could be done.
+
+The day was wretched. The snow had turned to rain. Mrs. Boyer, shopping,
+dragged wet skirts and damp feet from store to store. She found nothing
+that she cared for after all. The garments that looked chic in the
+windows or on manikins in the shops, were absurd on her. Her insistent
+bosom bulged, straight lines became curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets
+gaped, collars choked her or shocked her by their absence. In the mirror
+of Marie Jedlicka, clad in familiar garments that had accommodated
+themselves to the idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump,
+rather comely matron. Here before the plate glass of the modiste, under
+the glare of a hundred lights, side by side with a slim Austrian girl
+who looked like a willow wand, Mrs. Boyer was grotesque, ridiculous,
+monstrous. She shuddered. She almost wept.
+
+It was bad preparation for a visit to the Siebensternstrasse. Mrs.
+Boyer, finding her vanity gone, convinced that she was an absurdity
+physically, fell back for comfort on her soul. She had been a good wife
+and mother; she was chaste, righteous. God had been cruel to her in the
+flesh, but He had given her the spirit.
+
+“Madame wishes not the gown? It is beautiful--see the embroidery! And
+the neck may be filled with chiffon.”
+
+“Young woman,” she said grimly, “I see the embroidery; and the neck
+may be filled with chiffon, but not for me! And when you have had five
+children, you will not buy clothes like that either.”
+
+All the kindliness was gone from the visit to the Siebensternstrasse;
+only the determination remained. Wounded to the heart of her
+self-esteem, her pride in tatters, she took her way to the old lodge and
+climbed the stairs.
+
+She found a condition of mild excitement. Jimmy had slept long after his
+bath. Harmony practiced, cut up a chicken for broth, aired blankets for
+the chair into which Peter on his return was to lift the boy.
+
+She was called to inspect the mouse-cage, which, according to Jimmy, had
+strawberries in it.
+
+“Far back,” he explained. “There in the cotton, Harry.”
+
+But it was not strawberries. Harmony opened the cage and very tenderly
+took out the cotton nest. Eight tiny pink baby mice, clean washed by the
+mother, lay curled in a heap.
+
+It was a stupendous moment. The joy of vicarious parentage was Jimmy's.
+He named them all immediately and demanded food for them. On Harmony's
+delicate explanation that this was unnecessary, life took on a new
+meaning for Jimmy. He watched the mother lest she slight one. His
+responsibility weighed on him. Also his inquiring mind was very busy.
+
+“But how did they get there?” he demanded.
+
+“God sent them, just as he sends babies of all sorts.”
+
+“Did he send me?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“That's a good one on you, Harry. My father found me in a hollow tree.”
+
+“But don't you think God had something to do with it?”
+
+Jimmy pondered this.
+
+“I suppose,” he reflected, “God sent Daddy to find me so that I would be
+his little boy. You never happened to see any babies when you were out
+walking, did you, Harry?”
+
+“Not in stumps--but I probably wasn't looking.”
+
+Jimmy eyed her with sympathy.
+
+“You may some day. Would you like to have one?”
+
+“Very much,” said Harmony, and flushed delightfully.
+
+Jimmy was disposed to press the matter, to urge immediate maternity on
+her.
+
+“You could lay it here on the bed,” he offered, “and I'd watch it. When
+they yell you let 'em suck your finger. I knew a woman once that had a
+baby and she did that. And it could watch Isabella.” Isabella was the
+mother mouse. “And when I'm better I could take it walking.”
+
+“That,” said Harmony gravely, “is mighty fine of you, Jimmy boy. I--I'll
+think about it.” She never denied Jimmy anything, so now she temporized.
+
+“I'll ask Peter.”
+
+Harmony had a half-hysterical moment; then:
+
+“Wouldn't it be better,” she asked, “to keep anything of that sort a
+secret? And to surprise Peter?”
+
+The boy loved a secret. He played with it in lieu of other occupation.
+His uncertain future was sown thick with secrets that would never flower
+into reality. Thus Peter had shamelessly promised him a visit to the
+circus when he was able to go, Harmony not to be told until the tickets
+were bought. Anna had similarly promised to send him from America a
+pitcher's glove and a baseball bat. To this list of futurities he now
+added Harmony's baby.
+
+Harmony brought in her violin and played softly to him, not to disturb
+the sleeping mice. She sang, too, a verse that the Big Soprano had been
+fond of and that Jimmy loved. Not much of a voice was Harmony's, but
+sweet and low and very true, as became her violinist's ear.
+
+  “Ah, well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+   Deeply buried from human eyes,”
+
+she sang, her clear eyes luminous.
+
+  “And in the hereafter, angels may
+   Roll the stone from its grave away!”
+
+Mrs. Boyer mounted the stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She had
+snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although that very
+morning she had detested the suit, her round of shopping had again
+endeared it to her. She told the Portier in English what she thought
+of him, and climbed ponderously, pausing at each landing to examine the
+damage.
+
+Harmony, having sung Jimmy to sleep, was in the throes of an experiment.
+She was trying to smoke.
+
+A very human young person was Harmony, apt to be exceedingly wretched
+if her hat were of last year's fashion, anxious to be inconspicuous by
+doing what every one else was doing, conventional as are the very young,
+fearful of being an exception.
+
+And nearly every one was smoking. Many of the young women whom she met
+at the master's house had yellowed fingers and smoked in the anteroom;
+the Big Soprano had smoked; Anna and Scatchy had smoked; in the
+coffee-houses milliners' apprentices produced little silver mouth-pieces
+to prevent soiling their pretty lips and smoked endlessly. Even Peter
+had admitted that it was not a vice, but only a comfortable bad habit.
+And Anna had left a handful of cigarettes.
+
+Harmony was not smoking; she was experimenting. Peter and Anna had
+smoked together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without reasoning
+it out, Harmony was experimenting toward the end of establishing her
+relations with Peter still further on friendly and comradely grounds.
+Two men might smoke together; a man and a woman might smoke together
+as friends. According to Harmony's ideas, a girl paring potatoes might
+inspire sentiment, but smoking a cigarette--never!
+
+She did not like it. She thought, standing before her little mirror,
+that she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her lips together,
+as she had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke in a thin line. She
+smoked very hard, so that she stood in the center of a gray nimbus. She
+hated it, but she persisted. Perhaps it grew on one; perhaps, also,
+if she walked about it would choke her less. She practiced holding the
+thing between her first and second fingers, and found that easier than
+smoking. Then she went to the salon where there was more air, and tried
+exhaling through her nose. It made her sneeze.
+
+On the sneeze came Mrs. Boyer's ring. Harmony thought very fast. It
+might be the bread or the milk, but again--She flung the cigarette into
+the stove, shut the door, and answered the bell.
+
+Mrs. Boyer's greeting was colder than she had intended. It put Harmony
+on the defensive at once, made her uncomfortable. Like all the innocent
+falsely accused she looked guiltier than the guiltiest. Under Mrs.
+Boyer's searching eyes the enormity of her situation overwhelmed her.
+And over all, through salon and passage, hung the damning odor of the
+cigarette. Harmony, leading the way in, was a sheep before her shearer.
+
+“I'm calling on all of you,” said Mrs. Boyer, sniping. “I meant to bring
+Dr. Boyer's cards for every one, including Dr. Byrne.”
+
+“I'm sorry. Dr. Byrne is out.”
+
+“And Dr. Gates?”
+
+“She--she is away.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously changed the subject,
+requesting a needle and thread to draw the rent together. It had been in
+Harmony's mind to explain the situation, to show Jimmy to Mrs. Boyer,
+to throw herself on the older woman's sympathy, to ask advice. But
+the visitor's attitude made this difficult. To add to her discomfort,
+through the grating in the stove door was coming a thin thread of smoke.
+
+It was, after all, Mrs. Boyer who broached the subject again. She had
+had a cup of tea, and Harmony, sitting on a stool, had mended the rent
+so that it could hardly be seen. Mrs. Boyer, softened by the tea and by
+the proximity of Harmony's lovely head bent over her task, grew slightly
+more expansive.
+
+“I ought to tell you something, Miss Wells,” she said. “You remember my
+other visit?”
+
+“Perfectly.” Harmony bent still lower.
+
+“I did you an injustice at that time. I've been sorry ever since. I
+thought that there was no Dr. Gates. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to
+deny it. People do things in this wicked city that they wouldn't do at
+home. I confess I misjudged Peter Byrne. You can give him my apologies,
+since he won't see me.”
+
+“But he isn't here or of course he'd see you.”
+
+“Then,” demanded Mrs. Boyer grimly, “if Peter Byrne is not here, who has
+been smoking cigarettes in this room? There is one still burning in that
+stove!”
+
+Harmony's hand was forced. She was white as she cut the brown-silk
+thread and rose to her feet.
+
+“I think,” she said, “that I'd better go back a few weeks, Mrs. Boyer,
+and tell you a story, if you have time to listen.”
+
+“If it is disagreeable--”
+
+“Not at all. It is about Peter Byrne and myself, and--some others. It
+is really about Peter. Mrs. Boyer, will you come very quietly across the
+hall?”
+
+Mrs. Boyer, expecting Heaven knows what, rose with celerity. Harmony
+led the way to Jimmy's door and opened it. He was still asleep, a wasted
+small figure on the narrow bed. Beside him the mice frolicked in their
+cage, the sentry kept guard over Peter's shameless letters from the
+Tyrol, the strawberry babies wriggled in their cotton.
+
+“We are not going to have him very long,” said Harmony softly. “Peter is
+making him happy for a little while.”
+
+Back in the salon of Maria Theresa she told the whole story. Mrs. Boyer
+found it very affecting. Harmony sat beside her on a stool and she kept
+her hand on the girl's shoulder. When the narrative reached Anna's
+going away, however, she took it away. From that point on she sat
+uncompromisingly rigid and listened.
+
+“Then you mean to say,” she exploded when Harmony had finished, “that
+you intend to stay on here, just the two of you?”
+
+“And Jimmy.”
+
+“Bah! What has the child to do with it?”
+
+“We will find some one to take Anna's place.”
+
+“I doubt it. And until you do?”
+
+“There is nothing wicked in what we are doing. Don't you see, Mrs.
+Boyer, I can't leave the boy.”
+
+“Since Peter is so altruistic, let him hire a nurse.”
+
+Bad as things were, Harmony smiled.
+
+“A nurse!” she said. “Why, do you realize that he is keeping three
+people now on what is starvation for one?”
+
+“Then he's a fool!” Mrs. Boyer rose in majesty. “I'm not going to leave
+you here.”
+
+“I'm sorry. You must see--”
+
+“I see nothing but a girl deliberately putting herself in a compromising
+portion and worse.”
+
+“Mrs. Boyer!”
+
+“Get your things on. I guess Dr. Boyer and I can look after you until we
+can send you home.”
+
+“I am not going home--yet,” said poor Harmony, biting her lip to steady
+it.
+
+Back and forth waged the battle, Mrs. Boyer assailing, Harmony offering
+little defense but standing firm on her refusal to go as long as Peter
+would let her remain.
+
+“It means so much to me,” she ventured, goaded. “And I earn my lodging
+and board. I work hard and--I make him comfortable. It costs him very
+little and I give him something in exchange. All men are not alike. If
+the sort you have known are--are different--”
+
+This was unfortunate. Mrs. Boyer stiffened. She ceased offensive
+tactics, and retired grimly into the dignity of her high calling of
+virtuous wife and mother. She washed her hands of Harmony and Peter. She
+tied on her veil with shaking hands, and prepared to leave Harmony to
+her fate.
+
+“Give me your mother's address,” she demanded.
+
+“Certainly not.”
+
+“You absolutely refuse to save yourself?”
+
+“From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to save
+myself from, Mrs. Boyer--uncharitable people, and--and cruel people.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
+
+“Meaning me!” she retorted. “My dear child, people are always cruel who
+try to save us from ourselves.”
+
+Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna's specious arguments must pop into
+her head at that instant and demand expression.
+
+“People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old standards
+have gone. It is what one's conscience condemns that is wrong, isn't
+it? Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit the average, not the
+exception.”
+
+Anna! Anna!
+
+Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
+
+“You are impossible!” she snapped. “After all, I believe it is Peter who
+needs protection! I shall speak to him.”
+
+She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.
+
+“And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone. But if
+you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon YOU, keep your
+views to yourself.”
+
+Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy's room and sank
+on her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the coverlet; she
+dared not touch it for fear of waking him--but she laid her cheek close
+to it for comfort. When Peter came in, much later, he found the boy wide
+awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.
+
+“I think she's been crying,” Jimmy whispered. “She's been sobbing in her
+sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club. It was
+typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
+there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings.
+Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy
+of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and
+fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt.
+He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a
+magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and
+really in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and
+Harmony were not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and
+the reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in
+which he and Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter
+to scowl over his books at them, a future in which life was one long
+piano-violin duo, with the candles in the chandelier going out one by
+one, leaving them at last alone in scented darkness together--McLean
+heard nothing until the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
+
+After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating
+taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment
+that Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation
+was a little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with
+a stifled oath.
+
+Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
+
+“It is exactly as I tell you,” she was saying. “If Peter Byrne is trying
+to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been
+there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the
+club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one
+thing remains, she is not there now.”
+
+McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found
+a “comfortable” at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage.
+McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him.
+The cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of
+protests from its frantic passenger.
+
+The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence that
+afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He
+had thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew
+it now in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that
+maddened him: the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress
+in Peter's voice when he spoke to the girl, Peter's steady eyes in the
+semi-gloom of the salon while Harmony played.
+
+At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed,
+bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for
+half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the
+girl first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining--
+
+He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a madman. Peter
+was already there; his footprints were fresh in the slush of the path.
+The house door was closed but not locked. McLean ran up the stairs. It
+was barely twilight outside, but the staircase well was dark. At the
+upper landing he was compelled to fumble for the bell.
+
+Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the salon came
+a glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and furious, faced Peter.
+
+“I want to see Harmony,” he said without preface.
+
+Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when the bell
+rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs. Boyer's visit. In
+the second between the peal of the bell and his opening the door he had
+decided what to do.
+
+“Come in.”
+
+McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much shorter as
+slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his eyes.
+
+“Where is she?”
+
+“In the kitchen, I think. Come into the salon.”
+
+McLean flung off his coat. Peter closed the door behind him and stood
+just inside. He had his pipe as usual. “I came to see her, not you,
+Byrne.”
+
+“So I gather. I'll let you see her, of course, but don't you want to see
+me first?”
+
+“I want to take her away from here.”
+
+“Why? Are you better able to care for her than I am?”
+
+McLean stood rigid. He had thrust his clenched hands into his pockets.
+
+“You're a scoundrel, Byrne,” he said steadily. “Why didn't you tell me
+this this afternoon?”
+
+“Because I knew if I did you'd do just what you are doing.”
+
+“Are you going to keep her here?”
+
+Peter changed color at the thrust, but he kept himself in hand.
+
+“I'm not keeping her here,” he said patiently. “I'm doing the best I can
+under the circumstances.”
+
+“Then your best is pretty bad.”
+
+“Perhaps. If you would try to remember the circumstances, McLean,--that
+the girl has no place else to go, practically no money, and that I--”
+
+“I remember one circumstance, that you are living here alone with her
+and that you're crazy in love with her.”
+
+“That has nothing to do with you. As long as I treat her--”
+
+“Bah!”
+
+“Will you be good enough to let me finish what I am trying to say? She's
+safe with me. When I say that I mean it. She will not go away from
+here with you or with any one else if I can prevent it. And if you care
+enough about her to try to keep her happy you'll not let her know you
+have been here. I've got a woman coming to take Anna's place. That ought
+to satisfy you.”
+
+“Dr. Jennings?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“She'll not come. Mrs. Boyer has been talking to her. Inside of an hour
+the whole club will have it--every American in Vienna will know about it
+in a day or so. I tell you, Byrne, you're doing an awful thing.”
+
+Peter drew a long breath. He had had his bad half-hour before McLean
+came; had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony trying to smile,
+see her dragging about, languid and white, see her tragic attempts
+to greet him on the old familiar footing. Through it all he had been
+sustained by the thought that a day or two days would see the old
+footing reestablished, another woman in the house, life again worth the
+living and Harmony smiling up frankly into his eyes. Now this hope had
+departed.
+
+“You can't keep me from seeing her, you know,” McLean persisted. “I've
+got to put this thing to her. She's got to choose.”
+
+“What alternative have you to suggest?”
+
+“I'd marry her if she'd have me.”
+
+After all Peter had expected that. And, if she cared for the boy
+wouldn't that be best for her? What had he to offer against that? He
+couldn't marry. He could only offer her shelter, against everything
+else. Even then he did not dislike McLean. He was a man, every slender
+inch of him, this boy musician. Peter's heart sank, but he put down his
+pipe and turned to the door.
+
+“I'll call her,” he said. “But, since this concerns me very vitally, I
+should like to be here while you put the thing to her. After that if you
+like--”
+
+He called Harmony. She had given Jimmy his supper and was carrying out a
+tray that seemed hardly touched.
+
+“He won't eat to-night,” she said miserably. “Peter, if he stops eating,
+what can we do? He is so weak!”
+
+Peter, took the tray from her gently.
+
+“Harry dear,” he said, “I want you to come into the salon. Some one
+wishes to speak to you.”
+
+“To me?”
+
+“Yes. Harry, do you remember that evening in the kitchen when--Do you
+recall what I promised?”
+
+“Yes, Peter.”
+
+“You are sure you know what I mean?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That's all right, then. McLean wants to see you.”
+
+She hesitated, looking up at him.
+
+“McLean? You look so grave, Peter. What is it?”
+
+“He will tell you. Nothing alarming.”
+
+Peter gave McLean a minute alone after all, while he carried the tray
+to the kitchen. He had no desire to play watchdog over the girl, he told
+himself savagely; only to keep himself straight with her and to save
+her from McLean's impetuosity. He even waited in the kitchen to fill and
+light his pipe.
+
+McLean had worked himself into a very fair passion. He was intense,
+almost theatrical, as he stood with folded arms waiting for Harmony. So
+entirely did the girl fill his existence that he forgot, or did not care
+to remember, how short a time he had known her. As Harmony she dominated
+his life and his thoughts; as Harmony he addressed her when, rather
+startled, she entered the salon and stood just inside the closed door.
+
+“Peter said you wanted to speak to me.”
+
+McLean groaned. “Peter!” he said. “It is always Peter. Look here,
+Harmony, you cannot stay here.”
+
+“It is only for a few hours. To-morrow some one is coming. And, anyhow,
+Peter is going to Semmering. We know it is unusual, but what can we do?”
+
+“Unusual! It's--it's damnable. It's the appearance of the thing, don't
+you see that?”
+
+“I think it is rather silly to talk of appearance when there is no one
+to care. And how can I leave? Jimmy needs me all the time--”
+
+“That's another idiocy of Peter's. What does he mean by putting you in
+this position?”
+
+“I am one of Peter's idiocies.”
+
+Peter entered on that. He took in the situation with a glance, and
+Harmony turned to him; but if she had expected Peter to support her, she
+was disappointed. Whatever decision she was to make must be her own,
+in Peter's troubled mind. He crossed the room and stood at one of the
+windows, looking out, a passive participant in the scene.
+
+The day had been a trying one for Harmony. What she chose to consider
+Peter's defection was a fresh stab. She glanced from McLean, flushed and
+excited, to Peter's impassive back. Then she sat down, rather limp, and
+threw out her hands helplessly.
+
+“What am I to do?” she demanded. “Every one comes with cruel things to
+say, but no one tells me what to do.”
+
+Peter turned away from the window.
+
+“You can leave here,” ventured McLean. “That's the first thing. After
+that--”
+
+“Yes, and after that, what?”
+
+McLean glanced at Peter. Then he took a step toward the girl.
+
+“You could marry me, Harmony,” he said unsteadily. “I hadn't expected
+to tell you so soon, or before a third person.” He faltered before
+Harmony's eyes, full of bewilderment. “I'd be very happy if you--if you
+could see it that way. I care a great deal, you see.”
+
+It seemed hours to Peter before she made any reply, and that her voice
+came from miles away.
+
+“Is it really as bad as that?” she asked. “Have I made such a mess of
+things that some one, either you or Peter, must marry me to straighten
+things out? I don't want to marry any one. Do I have to?”
+
+“Certainly you don't have to,” said Peter. There was relief in his
+voice, relief and also something of exultation. “McLean, you mean well,
+but marriage isn't the solution. We were getting along all right until
+our friends stepped in. Let Mrs. Boyer howl all over the colony; there
+will be one sensible woman somewhere to come and be comfortable here
+with us. In the interval we'll manage, unless Harmony is afraid. In that
+case--”
+
+“Afraid of what?”
+
+The two men exchanged glances, McLean helpless, Peter triumphant.
+
+“I do not care what Mrs. Boyer says, at least not much. And I am not
+afraid of anything else at all.”
+
+McLean picked up his overcoat.
+
+“At least,” he appealed to Peter, “you'll come over to my place?”
+
+“No!” said Peter.
+
+McLean made a final appeal to Harmony.
+
+“If this gets out,” he said, “you are going to regret it all your life.”
+
+“I shall have nothing to regret,” she retorted proudly.
+
+Had Peter not been there McLean would have made a better case, would
+have pleaded with her, would have made less of a situation that roused
+her resentment and more of his love for her. He was very hard hit, very
+young. He was almost hysterical with rage and helplessness; he wanted
+to slap her, to take her in his arms. He writhed under the restraint of
+Peter's steady eyes.
+
+He got to the door and turned, furious.
+
+“Then it's up to you,” he flung at Peter. “You're old enough to know
+better; she isn't. And don't look so damned superior. You're human, like
+the rest of us. And if any harm comes to her--”
+
+Here unexpectedly Peter held out his hand, and after a sheepish moment
+McLean took it.
+
+“Good-night, old man,” said Peter. “And--don't be an ass.”
+
+As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean knew
+what in his heart he had known all along--that the girl was safe enough;
+that all that was to fear was the gossip of scandal-lovers. He took
+Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony stood before her very erect.
+
+“I suppose I've said too much; I always do,” he said contritely. “But
+you know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?”
+
+“I am only sorry.”
+
+He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic moment for
+him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door and down the dark
+stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax, after all that, to have Peter
+discover he had gone without his hat and toss it down to him a flight
+below.
+
+All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between Harmony and
+Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked during the meal of
+careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and Peter's proposed trip to
+Semmering, avoided each other's eyes, ate little or nothing. Once when
+Harmony passed Peter his coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between
+them they dropped the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns,
+Peter wretched and silent.
+
+Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from
+Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days. In two
+days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some one else. In two
+days some of the restraint would have worn off. Things would never be
+the same, but they would be forty-eight hours better.
+
+Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading aloud to
+him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a valise for the
+next day's journey and counted out into an envelope half of the money he
+had with him. This he labeled “Household Expenses” and set it up on
+his table, leaning against his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony
+about. The salon was dark except for the study lamp turned down.
+
+Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers
+and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the landing; Peter
+carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles on Jimmy's stand
+and wrote full directions for every emergency he could imagine. Then,
+finding it still only nine o'clock, he turned up the lamp in the salon
+and wrote an exciting letter from Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb,
+wandering on the mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and
+carried down into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because
+he stood so in loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable that
+before long Jimmy would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and, of course,
+because it had been a trying day all through, Peter's lips were none too
+steady as he folded up the letter.
+
+The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and closed
+the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to feel his way
+through the room. It touched a little sweater coat of Harmony's, hanging
+over the back of a chair. Peter picked it up in a very passion of
+tenderness and held it to him.
+
+“Little girl!” he choked. “My little girl! God help me!”
+
+He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to find
+that the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could rouse such a
+storm in him. It made him pause. He put down the coat and pulled himself
+up sharply. McLean was right; he was only human stuff, very poor human
+stuff. He put the little coat down hastily, only to lift it again gently
+to his lips.
+
+“Good-night, dear,” he whispered. “Goodnight, Harmony.”
+
+Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and
+supper that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor
+pension. They came to make inquiries.
+
+The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of
+the bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still lacked an
+occupant.
+
+Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly
+medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of
+language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life
+are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual
+disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised
+eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of
+Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter
+was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.
+
+“The women were also wicked,” she said. “Of a man what does one expect?
+But of a woman! And the younger one looked--Herr Gott! She had the eyes
+of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of them
+left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The
+Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he
+so to me!”
+
+“She says,” interpreted Dr. Jennings, “that they were a bad lot--that
+the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!”
+
+Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on
+the other woman's arm.
+
+“What an escape for you!” she said. “If you had gone there to live and
+then found the establishment--queer!”
+
+From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.
+Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.
+
+“American ladies!” said Olga. “Two, old and fat.”
+
+“More hot water!” growled Katrina. “Why do not the Americans stay in
+their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the
+earth.”
+
+Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.
+
+“Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne
+and the others!”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Of a certainty.”
+
+“Then let me to the door!”
+
+“A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says--how she is
+wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she
+sent them all away. Here, take the door!”
+
+Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the
+dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having
+retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best
+forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a
+slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her
+head. “The Frau Schwarz is wrong,” cried Olga passionately in Vienna
+dialect. “They were good, all of them!”
+
+“What in the world--”
+
+“And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr
+Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her.”
+
+Dr. Jennings was puzzled.
+
+“She wishes to know where the girl lives,” she interpreted to Mrs.
+Boyer. “A man wishes to know.”
+
+“Naturally!” said Mrs. Boyer. “Well, don't tell her.”
+
+Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to
+be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev,
+Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were
+inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a
+gesture.
+
+“She says,” she interpreted as they walked on, “that Dr. Peter--by which
+I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a necktie, and that she'll be in
+hot water if she does not return it.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer sniffed.
+
+“In love with him, probably, like the others!” she said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very early and
+without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying diagonally across
+his small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets. The communicating door
+into Harmony's room was open. Peter kept his eyes carefully from it,
+but his ears were less under control. He could hear her soft breathing.
+There were days coming when Peter would stand where he stood then and
+listen, and find only silence.
+
+He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully behind
+him and lighting a match to find his way down the staircase. The Portier
+was not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and to stand by while he donned
+the trousers which he deemed necessary to the dignity of his position
+before he opened the street door.
+
+Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter. The dawn
+grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The hurrying crowds
+at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his coffee, taken from a bare
+table in the station. The horizontal morning sunlight, shining in
+through marvelously clean windows, warmed the marble of the floor, made
+black shadows beside the heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into
+gold the hair of a toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The
+same morning light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of
+one of his shoes. Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at
+the bits of dust that floated in the sunshine.
+
+Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a passing
+thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it lasted Peter was a
+king. Everything was well. The world was his oyster. Life was his,
+to make it what he would--youth and hope and joy. Under the beatific
+influence he expanded, grew, almost shone. Youth and hope and joy--that
+cometh in the morning.
+
+The ecstasy passed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer shone;
+he still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and hugged it. He
+hunted out a beggar he had passed and gave him five Hellers. He helped a
+suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered bundle; he called the guard
+on the train “son” and forced a grin out of that dignitary.
+
+Peter traveled third-class, which was quite comfortable, and no bother
+about “Nicht Rauchen” signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness persisted as
+far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing ruggedness of the scenery
+and his first view of the Raxalpe, came recollection of the urgency of
+Stewart's last message, of Marie Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy
+that awaited him at the end of his journey.
+
+Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected. Love
+was a blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in
+his corner and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he
+recalled the look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when
+she looked at Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little
+thing. If only she'd had a chance!--Why wasn't he rich enough to help
+the ones who needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no
+one the wiser, and make her way.
+
+“Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!” Peter reflected. “Poor
+little guttersnipe!”
+
+The weather was beautiful. The sleet of the previous day in Vienna had
+been a deep snowfall on the mountains. The Schwarza was frozen, the
+castle of Liechtenstein was gray against a white world. A little
+pilgrimage church far below seemed snowed in against the faithful. The
+third-class compartment filled with noisy skiing parties. The old woman
+opened her oilcloth bundle, and taking a cat out of a box inside fed it
+a sausage.
+
+Up and up, past the Weinzettelwand and the Station Breitenstein, across
+the highest viaduct, the Kalte Rinne, and so at last to Semmering.
+
+The glow had died at last for Peter. He did not like his errand, was
+very vague, indeed, as to just what that errand might be. He was stiff
+and rather cold. Also he thought the cat might stifle in the oilcloth,
+but the old woman too clearly distrusted him to make it possible
+to interfere. Anyhow, he did not know the German for either cat or
+oilcloth.
+
+He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This made
+him vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know Stewart well
+enough to know whether he was punctilious in such matters or not: as a
+matter of fact he hardly knew him at all. It was because he had appealed
+to him that Peter was there, it being only necessary to Peter to be
+needed, and he was anywhere.
+
+The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his valise
+and started up--first long flights of steps through the pines, then a
+steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he met groups coming
+down, men that he thought probably American, pretty women in “tams” and
+sweaters. He watched for Marie, but there was no sign of her.
+
+He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he turned
+in at the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people following it,
+coming toward him. It was a singularly silent party. Peter, with his
+hand on the door-knocker, watched its approach with some curiosity.
+
+It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round it.
+Even then Peter did not understand. He did not understand until he
+saw Stewart, limp and unconscious, lifted out of the straw and carried
+toward him.
+
+Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery.
+And Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
+possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for Stewart,
+of publicity that would mean an end to the situation. But every inch of
+her soul was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down,
+and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree
+tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps
+even not yet dead--that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time
+and suffer!
+
+Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
+threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter, it had
+been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But there was
+this difference, whereas before he had drawn her back from the window
+and clapped her into sanity, now he let her alone. At the end of one of
+their quarrels she had flung out on to the balcony, and then had watched
+him through the opening in the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!
+
+Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over the
+mountain roads, seldom alone with Anita, but always near her. He left
+Marie sulking or sewing, as the case might be. He returned in the
+evening to find her still sulking, still sewing.
+
+But Marie did not sulk all day, or sew. She too was out, never far from
+Stewart, always watching. Many times she escaped discovery only by a
+miracle, as when she stooped behind an oxcart, pretending to tie her
+shoe, or once when they all met face to face, and although she lowered
+her veil Stewart must have known her instantly had he not been so intent
+on helping Anita over a slippery gutter.
+
+She planned a dozen forms of revenge and found them impossible of
+execution. Stewart himself was frightfully unhappy. For the first
+time in his life he was really in love, with all the humility of the
+condition. There were days when he would not touch Anita's hand, when
+he hardly spoke, when the girl herself would have been outraged at
+his conduct had she not now and then caught him watching her, seen the
+wretchedness in his eyes.
+
+The form of Marie's revenge was unpremeditated, after all. The light
+mountain snow was augmented by a storm; roads were ploughed through
+early in the morning, leaving great banks on either side. Sleigh-bells
+were everywhere. Coasting parties made the steep roads a menace to
+the pedestrian; every up-climbing sleigh carried behind it a string of
+sleds, going back to the starting-point.
+
+Below the hotel was the Serpentine Coast, a long and dangerous course,
+full of high-banked curves, of sudden descents, of long straightaway
+dashes through the woodland. Two miles, perhaps three, it wound its
+tortuous way down the mountain. Up by the highroad to the crest again,
+only a mile or less. Thus it happened that the track was always clear,
+except for speeding sleds. No coasters, dragging sleds back up the
+slide, interfered.
+
+The track was crowded. Every minute a sled set out, sped down the
+straightaway, dipped, turned, disappeared. A dozen would be lined up,
+waiting for the interval and the signal. And here, watching from the
+porch of the church, in the very shadow of the saints, Marie found her
+revenge.
+
+Stewart had given her a little wrist watch. Stewart and Anita
+were twelfth in line. By the watch, then, twelve minutes down the
+mountain-side, straight down through the trees to a curve that Marie
+knew well, a bad curve, only to be taken by running well up on the
+snowbank. Beyond the snowbank there was a drop, fifteen feet, perhaps
+more, into the yard of a Russian villa. Stewart and Anita were twelfth;
+a man in a green stocking-cap was eleventh. The hillside was steep.
+Marie negotiated it by running from tree to tree, catching herself,
+steadying for a second, then down again. Once she fell and rolled a
+little distance. There was no time to think; perhaps had she thought she
+would have weakened. She had no real courage, only desperation.
+
+As she reached the track the man in the green stocking-cap was in
+sight. A minute and a half she had then, not more. She looked about her
+hastily. A stone might serve her purpose, almost anything that would
+throw the sled out of its course. She saw a tree branch just above the
+track and dragged at it frantically. Some one was shouting at her from
+an upper window of the Russian villa. She did not hear. Stewart and
+Anita had made the curve above and were coming down at frantic speed.
+Marie stood, her back to the oncoming rush of the sled, swaying
+slightly. When she could hear the singing of the runners she stooped and
+slid the tree branch out against the track.
+
+She had acted almost by instinct, but with devilish skill. The sled
+swung to one side up the snowbank, and launched itself into the air.
+Marie heard the thud and the silence that followed it. Then she turned
+and scuttled like a hunted thing up the mountain side.
+
+Peter put in a bad day. Marie was not about, could not be located.
+Stewart, suffering from concussion, lay insensible all day and all of
+the night. Peter could find no fracture, but felt it wise to get another
+opinion. In the afternoon he sent for a doctor from the Kurhaus and
+learned for the first time that Anita had also been hurt--a broken arm.
+“Not serious,” said the Kurhaus man. “She is brave, very brave, the
+young woman. I believe they are engaged?” Peter said he did not know and
+thought very hard. Where was Marie? Not gone surely. Here about him lay
+all her belongings, even her purse.
+
+Toward evening Stewart showed some improvement. He was not conscious,
+but he swallowed better and began to toss about. Peter, who had had a
+long day and very little sleep the night before, began to look jaded. He
+would have sent for a nurse from the Kurhaus, but he doubted Stewart's
+ability to stand any extra financial strain, and Peter could not help
+any.
+
+The time for supper passed, and no Marie.
+
+The landlady sent up a tray to Peter, stewed meat and potatoes, a
+salad, coffee. Peter sat in a corner with his back to Stewart and ate
+ravenously. He had had nothing since the morning's coffee. After that he
+sat down again by the bed to watch. There was little to do but watch.
+
+The meal had made him drowsy. He thought of his pipe. Perhaps if he got
+some fresh air and a smoke! He remembered the balcony.
+
+It was there on the balcony that he found Marie, a cowering thing that
+pushed his hands away when he would have caught her and broke into
+passionate crying.
+
+“I cannot! I cannot!”
+
+“Cannot what?” demanded Peter gently, watching her. So near was the
+balcony rail!
+
+“Throw myself over. I've tried, Peter. I cannot!”
+
+“I should think not!” said Peter sternly. “Just now when we need you,
+too! Come in and don't be a foolish child.”
+
+But Marie would not go in. She held back, clinging tight to Peter's big
+hand, moaning out in the dialect of the people that always confused him
+her story of the day, of what she had done, of watching Stewart brought
+back, of stealing into the house and through an adjacent room to the
+balcony, of her desperation and her cowardice.
+
+She was numb with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, quite childish,
+helpless. Peter stood out on the balcony with his arm round her, while
+the night wind beat about them, and pondered what was best to do. He
+thought she might come in and care for Stewart, at least, until he was
+conscious. He could get her some supper.
+
+“How can I?” she asked. “I was seen. They are searching for me now. Oh,
+Peter! Peter!”
+
+“Who is searching for you? Who saw you?”
+
+“The people in the Russian villa.”
+
+“Did they see your face?”
+
+“I wore a veil. I think not.”
+
+“Then come in and change your clothes. There is a train down at
+midnight. You can take it.”
+
+“I have no money.”
+
+This raised a delicate question. Marie absolutely refused to take
+Stewart's money. She had almost none of her own. And there were other
+complications--where was she to go? The family of the injured girl did
+not suspect her since they did not know of her existence. She might get
+away without trouble. But after that, what?
+
+Peter pondered this on the balcony, while Marie in the bedroom was
+changing her clothing, soaked with a day in the snow. He came to the
+inevitable decision, the decision he knew at the beginning that he was
+going to make.
+
+“If I could only put it up to Harmony first!” he reflected. “But she
+will understand when I tell her. She always understands.”
+
+Standing there on the little balcony, with tragedy the thickness of
+a pine board beyond him, Peter experienced a bit of the glow of the
+morning, as of one who stumbling along in a dark place puts a hand on a
+friend.
+
+He went into the room. Stewart was lying very still and breathing
+easily. On her knees beside the bed knelt Marie. At Peter's step she
+rose and faced him.
+
+“I am leaving him, Peter, for always.”
+
+“Good!” said Peter heartily. “Better for you and better for him.”
+
+Marie drew a long breath. “The night train,” she said listlessly, “is an
+express. I had forgotten. It is double fare.”
+
+“What of that, little sister?” said Peter. “What is a double fare when
+it means life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And there will be
+happiness, little sister.”
+
+He put his hand in his pocket.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The Portier was almost happy that morning. For one thing, he had won
+honorable mention at the Schubert Society the night before; for another,
+that night the Engel was to sing Mignon, and the Portier had spent his
+Christmas tips for a ticket. All day long he had been poring over the
+score.
+
+“'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen?'” he sang with feeling
+while he polished the floors. He polished them with his feet, wearing
+felt boots for the purpose, and executing in the doing a sort of
+ungainly dance--a sprinkle of wax, right foot forward and back, left
+foot forward and back, both feet forward and back in a sort of double
+shuffle; more wax, more vigorous polishing, more singing, with longer
+pauses for breath. “'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees
+bloom?'” he bellowed--sprinkle of wax, right foot, left foot, any foot
+at all. Now and then he took the score from his pocket and pored over
+it, humming the air, raising his eyebrows over the high notes, dropping
+his chin to the low ones. It was a wonderful morning. Between greetings
+to neighbors he sang--a bit of talk, a bit of song.
+
+“'Kennst du das Land'--Good-morning, sir--the old Rax wears a crown. It
+will snow soon. 'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen'--Ah, madam the milk
+Frau, and are the cows frozen up to-day like the pump? No? Marvelous!
+Dost thou know that to-night is Mignon at the Opera, and that the Engel
+sings? 'Kennst du das Land'--”
+
+At eleven came Rosa with her husband, the soldier from Salzburg with one
+lung. He was having a holiday from his sentry duty at the hospital,
+and the one lung seemed to be a libel, for while the women had coffee
+together and a bit of mackerel he sang a very fair bass to the Portier's
+tenor. Together they pored over the score, and even on their way to the
+beer hall hummed together such bits as they recalled.
+
+On one point they differed. The score was old and soiled with much
+thumbing. At one point, destroyed long since, the sentry sang A sharp:
+the Portier insisted on A natural. They argued together over three
+Steins of beer; the waiter, referred to, decided for A flat. It was a
+serious matter to have one's teeth set, as one may say, for a natural
+and then to be shocked with an unexpected half-tone up or down! It
+destroyed the illusion; it disappointed; it hurt.
+
+The sentry stuck to the sharp--it was sung so at the Salzburg opera.
+The Portier snapped his thumb at the Salzburg opera. Things were looking
+serious; they walked back to the locale in silence. The sentry coughed.
+Possibly there was something, after all, in the one-lung rumor.
+
+It was then that the Portier remembered Harmony. She would know; perhaps
+she had the score.
+
+Harmony was having a bad morning. She had slept little until dawn, and
+Peter's stealthy closing of the outer door had wakened her by its very
+caution. After that there had been no more sleep. She had sat up in bed
+with her chin in her hands and thought.
+
+In the pitiless dawn, with no Peter to restore her to cheerfulness,
+things looked black, indeed. To what had she fallen, that first one man
+and then another must propose marriage to her to save her. To save her
+from what? From what people thought, or--each from the other?
+
+Were men so evil that they never trusted each other? McLean had frankly
+distrusted Peter, had said so. Or could it be that there was something
+about her, something light and frivolous? She had been frivolous. She
+always laughed at Peter's foolishnesses. Perhaps that was it. That
+was it. They were afraid for her. She had thrown herself on Peter's
+hands--almost into his arms. She had made this situation.
+
+She must get away, of course. If only she had some one to care for Jimmy
+until Peter returned! But there was no one. The Portier's wife was fond
+of Jimmy, but not skillful. And suppose he were to wake in the night and
+call for her and she would not come. She cried a little over this. After
+a time she pattered across the room in her bare feet and got from a
+bureau drawer the money she had left. There was not half enough to take
+her home. She could write; the little mother might get some for her, but
+at infinite cost, infinite humiliation. That would have to be a final,
+desperate resort.
+
+She felt a little more cheerful when she had had a cup of coffee. Jimmy
+wakened about that time, and she went through the details of his morning
+toilet with all the brightness she could assume--bath blankets, warm
+bath, toenails, finger-nails, fresh nightgown, fresh sheets, and--final
+touch of all--a real barber's part straight from crown to brow. After
+that ten minutes under extra comforters while the room aired.
+
+She hung over the boy that morning in an agony of tenderness--he was so
+little, so frail, and she must leave him. Only one thing sustained her.
+The boy loved her, but it was Peter he idolized. When he had Peter he
+needed nothing else. In some curious process of his childish mind Peter
+and Daddy mingled in inextricable confusion. More than once he had
+recalled events in the roving life he and his father had led.
+
+“You remember that, don't you?” he would say.
+
+“Certainly I remember,” Peter would reply heartily.
+
+“That evening on the steamer when I ate so many raisins.”
+
+“Of course. And were ill.”
+
+“Not ill--not that time. But you said I'd make a good pudding! You
+remember that, don't you?”
+
+And Peter would recall it all.
+
+Peter would be left. That was the girl's comfort.
+
+She made a beginning at gathering her things together that morning,
+while the boy dozed and the white mice scurried about the little cage.
+She could not take her trunk, or Peter would trace it. She would have
+to carry her belongings, a few at a time, to wherever she found a room.
+Then when Peter came back she could slip away and he would never find
+her.
+
+At noon came the Portier and the sentry, now no longer friends, and rang
+the doorbell. Harmony was rather startled. McLean and Mrs. Boyer had
+been her only callers, and she did not wish to see either of them. But
+after a second ring she gathered her courage in her hands and opened the
+door.
+
+She turned pale when she saw the sentry in his belted blue-gray tunic
+and high cap. She thought, of course, that Jimmy had been traced and
+that now he would be taken away. If the sentry knew her, however, he
+kept his face impassive and merely touched his cap. The Portier stated
+their errand. Harmony's face cleared. She even smiled as the Portier
+extended to her the thumbed score with its missing corner. What,
+after all, does it matter which was right--whether it was A sharp or A
+natural? What really matters is that Harmony, having settled the dispute
+and clinched the decision by running over the score for a page or two,
+turned to find the Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on
+paunch, enjoying a delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in
+sight.
+
+He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where,
+taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders
+back, arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with
+amazing rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the
+little boy in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth,
+and eyes seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with
+one another. When all was over--perhaps when his repertoire was
+exhausted--the sentry returned his nose to the center of his face,
+replaced eyes and mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton
+handkerchief. Then, still in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving
+the youngster enraptured, staring at the doorway.
+
+Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the
+higher part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were many
+unpretentious buildings. She had hunted board there and she knew. It
+was far from the Stadt, far from the fashionable part of town, a
+neighborhood of small shops, of frank indigence. There surely she could
+find a room, and perhaps in one of the small stores what she failed to
+secure in the larger, a position.
+
+Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's wife
+to sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking about for
+a room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small and wretchedly
+furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap dressmaker. The approach
+was forbidding enough. One entered a cavelike, cobble-paved court
+under the building, filled with wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and
+swearing teamsters. From the side a stone staircase took off and led,
+twisting from one landing cave to another, to the upper floor.
+
+Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of
+sewing-machines, the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a
+home but a hiding-place, took the room at once. She was asked for no
+reference. In a sort of agony lest this haven fail her she paid for a
+week in advance. The wooden bed, the cracked mirror over the table, even
+the pigeons outside on the windowsill were hers for a week.
+
+The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.
+
+“I will have it cleaned,” she explained. “I have been so busy: the
+masquerade season is on. The Fraulein is American, is she not?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“One knows the Americans. They are chic, not like the English. I have
+some American customers.”
+
+Harmony started. The dressmaker was shrewd. Many people hid in the
+sixteenth district. She hastened to reassure the girl.
+
+“They will not disturb you. And just now I have but one, a dancer. I
+shall have the room cleaned. Good-bye, Fraulein.”
+
+So far, good. She had a refuge now, one spot that the venom of scandal
+could not poison, where she could study and work--work hard, although
+there could be no more lessons--one spot where Peter would not have to
+protect her, where Peter, indeed, would never find her. This thought,
+which should have brought comfort, brought only new misery. Peace seemed
+dearly bought all at once; shabby, wholesome, hearty Peter, with his
+rough hair and quiet voice, his bulging pockets and steady eyes--she was
+leaving Peter forever, exchanging his companionship for that of a row
+of pigeons on a window-sill. He would find some one, of course; but who
+would know that he liked toast made hard and plenty of butter, or to
+leave his bed-clothing loose at the foot, Peter being very long and apt
+to lop over? The lopping over brought a tear or two. A very teary and
+tragic young heroine, this Harmony, prone to go about for the last day
+or two with a damp little handkerchief tucked in her sleeve.
+
+She felt her way down the staircase and into the cave below. Fate hangs
+by a very slender thread sometimes. If a wagon had not lumbered by as
+she reached the lowest step, so that she must wait and thus had time
+to lower her veil, she would have been recognized at once by the little
+Georgiev, waiting to ascend. But the wagon was there, Harmony lowered
+her veil, the little Georgiev, passing a veiled young woman in the
+gloom, went up the staircase with even pulses and calm and judicial
+bearing, up to the tiny room a floor or two below Harmony's, where he
+wrote reports to the Minister of War and mixed them with sonnets--to
+Harmony.
+
+Harmony went back to the Siebensternstrasse, having accomplished what
+she had set out to do and being very wretched in consequence. Because
+she was leaving the boy so soon she strove to atone for her coming
+defection by making it a gala evening. The child was very happy. She
+tucked him up in the salon, lighted all the candles, served him the
+daintiest of suppers there. She brought in the mice and tied tiny bows
+on their necks; she played checkers with him while the supper dishes
+waited, and went down to defeat in three hilarious games; and last of
+all she played to him, joyous music at first, then slower, drowsier
+airs, until his heavy head dropped on his shoulder and she gathered him
+up in tender arms and carried him to bed.
+
+It was dawn when Marie arrived. Harmony was sleeping soundly when the
+bell rang. Her first thought was that Peter had come back--but Peter
+carried a key. The bell rang again, and she slipped on the old kimono
+and went to the door.
+
+“Is it Peter?” she called, hand on knob.
+
+“I come from Peter. I have a letter,” in German.
+
+“Who is it?”
+
+“You do not know me--Marie Jedlicka. Please let me come in.”
+
+Bewildered, Harmony opened the door, and like a gray ghost Marie slipped
+by her and into the hall.
+
+There was a gaslight burning very low; Harmony turned it up and faced
+her visitor. She recognized her at once--the girl Dr. Stewart had been
+with in the coffee-house.
+
+“Something has happened to Peter!”
+
+“No. He is well. He sent this to the Fraulein Wells.”
+
+“I am the Fraulein Wells.”
+
+Marie held out the letter and staggered. Harmony put her in a chair; she
+was bewildered, almost frightened. Crisis of some sort was written on
+Marie's face. Harmony felt very young, very incapable. The other girl
+refused coffee, would not even go into the salon until Peter's letter
+had been read. She was a fugitive, a criminal; the Austrian law is
+severe to those that harbor criminals. Let Harmony read:--
+
+“DEAR HARRY,--Will you forgive me for this and spread the wings of your
+splendid charity over this poor child? Perhaps I am doing wrong in
+sending her to you, but just now it is all I can think of. If she wants
+to talk let her talk. It will probably help her. Also feed her, will
+you? And if she cannot sleep, give her one of the blue powders I fixed
+for Jimmy. I'll be back later to-day if I can make it.
+
+“PETER”
+
+Harmony glanced up from the letter. Marie sat drooping in her chair. Her
+eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her at once, but any
+surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in Peter's apartment was
+sunk in a general apathy, a compound of nervous reaction and fatigue.
+During the long hours in the express she had worn herself out with
+fright and remorse: there was nothing left now but exhaustion.
+
+Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold kitchen
+and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she could in the
+salon, and then went into her room to dress. There she read the letter
+again, and wondered if Peter had gone through life like this, picking up
+waifs and strays and shouldering their burdens for them. Decidedly, life
+with Peter was full of surprises.
+
+She remembered, as she hurried into her clothes; the boys' club back
+in America and the spelling-matches. Decidedly, also, Peter was an
+occupation, a state of mind, a career. No musician, hoping for a career
+of her own, could possibly marry Peter.
+
+That was a curious morning in the old lodge of Maria Theresa, while
+Stewart in the Pension Waldheim struggled back to consciousness, while
+Peter sat beside him and figured on an old envelope the problem of
+dividing among four enough money to support one, while McLean ate his
+heart out in wretchedness in his hotel.
+
+Marie told her story over the early breakfast, sitting with her thin
+elbows on the table, her pointed chin in her palms.
+
+“And now I am sorry,” she finished. “It has done no good. If it had only
+killed her but she was not much hurt. I saw her rise and bend over him.”
+
+Harmony was silent. She had no stock of aphorisms for the situation, no
+worldly knowledge, only pity.
+
+“Did Peter say he would recover?”
+
+“Yes. They will both recover and go to America. And he will marry her.”
+
+Perhaps Harmony would have been less comfortable, Marie less frank, had
+Marie realized that this establishment of Peter's was not on the same
+basis as Stewart's had been, or had Harmony divined her thought.
+
+The presence of the boy was discovered by his waking. Marie was taken
+in and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a
+marvelous people--to have taken into their house and their hearts this
+strange child--if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little slum mind
+was not certain.
+
+In the safety and comfort of the little apartment the Viennese expanded,
+cheered. She devoted herself to the boy, telling him strange folk tales,
+singing snatches of songs for him. The youngster took a liking to her at
+once. It seemed to Harmony, going about her morning routine, that Marie
+was her solution and Peter's.
+
+During the afternoon she took a package to the branch post-office and
+mailed it by parcel-post to the Wollbadgasse. On the way she met Mrs.
+Boyer face to face. That lady looked severely ahead, and Harmony passed
+her with her chin well up and the eyes of a wounded animal.
+
+McLean sent a great box of flowers that day. She put them, for lack of a
+vase, in a pitcher beside Jimmy's bed.
+
+At dusk a telegram came to say that Stewart was better and that Peter
+was on his way down to Vienna. He would arrive at eight. Time was
+very short now--seconds flashed by, minutes galloped. Harmony stewed
+a chicken for supper, and creamed the breast for Jimmy. She fixed the
+table, flowers in the center, the best cloth, Peter's favorite cheese.
+Six o'clock, six-thirty, seven; Marie was telling Jimmy a fairy tale and
+making the fairies out of rosebuds. The studylamp was lighted, the stove
+glowing, Peter's slippers were out, his old smoking-coat, his pipe.
+
+A quarter past seven. Peter would be near Vienna now and hungry. If he
+could only eat his supper before he learned--but that was impossible.
+He would come in, as he always did, and slam the outer door, and open it
+again to close it gently, as he always did, and then he would look for
+her, going from room to room until he found her--only to-night he would
+not find her.
+
+She did not say good-bye to Jimmy. She stood in the doorway and said a
+little prayer for him. Marie had made the flower fairies on needles, and
+they stood about his head on the pillow--pink and yellow and white elves
+with fluffy skirts. Then, very silently, she put on her hat and jacket
+and closed the outer door behind her. In the courtyard she turned and
+looked up. The great chandelier in the salon was not lighted, but from
+the casement windows shone out the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Peter had had many things to think over during the ride down the
+mountains. He had the third-class compartment to himself, and sat in a
+corner, soft hat over his eyes. Life had never been particularly simple
+to Peter--his own life, yes; a matter of three meals a day--he had had
+fewer--a roof, clothing. But other lives had always touched him closely,
+and at the contact points Peter glowed, fused, amalgamated. Thus he had
+been many people--good, indifferent, bad, but all needy. Thus, also,
+Peter had committed vicarious crimes, suffered vicarious illnesses,
+starved, died, loved--vicariously.
+
+And now, after years of living for others, Peter was living at last for
+himself--and suffering.
+
+Not that he understood exactly what ailed him. He thought he was tired,
+which was true enough, having had little sleep for two or three
+nights. Also he explained to himself that he was smoking too much, and
+resolutely--lighted another cigarette.
+
+Two things had revealed Peter's condition to himself: McLean had said:
+“You are crazy in love with her.” McLean's statement, lacking subtlety,
+had had a certain quality of directness. Even then Peter, utterly
+miserable, had refused to capitulate, when to capitulate would have
+meant the surrender of the house in the Siebensternstrasse. And the
+absence from Harmony had shown him just where he stood.
+
+He was in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with
+it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly
+it was, this love. Even if Harmony cared--and at the mere thought his
+heart pounded--what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her to
+accept the half of--nothing, to give up a career to share his struggle
+for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty under a
+bushel that he might wave aloft his feeble light!
+
+And there was no way out, no royal road to fortune by the route he had
+chosen; nothing but grinding work, with a result problematical and years
+ahead. There were even no legacies to expect, he thought whimsically.
+Peter had known a chap once, struggling along in gynecology, who had
+had a fortune left him by a G. P., which being interpreted is Grateful
+Patient. Peter's patients had a way of living, and when they did drop
+out, as happened now and then, had also a way of leaving Peter an unpaid
+bill in token of appreciation; Peter had even occasionally helped to
+bury them, by way, he defended himself, of covering up his mistakes.
+
+Peter, sitting back in his corner, allowed the wonderful scenery to slip
+by unnoticed. He put Harmony the Desirable out of his mind, and took
+to calculating on a scrap of paper what could be done for Harmony the
+Musician. He could hold out for three months, he calculated, and still
+have enough to send Harmony home and to get home himself on a slow boat.
+The Canadian lines were cheap. If Jimmy lived perhaps he could take him
+along: if not--
+
+He would have to put six months' work in the next three. That was not so
+hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived on it. Also
+there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in the salon propped in
+a chair and Harmony playing, the room dark save for the glow from the
+stove and for the one candle at Harmony's elbow.
+
+All roads lead to Rome. Peter's thoughts, having traveled in a circle,
+were back again to Harmony the Desirable--Harmony playing in the
+firelight, Harmony Hushed over the brick stove, Harmony paring potatoes
+that night in the kitchen when he--Harmony! Harmony!
+
+Stewart knew all about the accident and its cause. Peter had surmised as
+much when the injured man failed to ask for Marie.
+
+He tested him finally by bringing Marie's name into the conversation.
+Stewart ignored it, accepted her absence, refused to be drawn.
+
+That was at first. During the day, however, as he gained strength, he
+grew restless and uneasy. As the time approached for Peter to leave, he
+was clearly struggling with himself. The landlady had agreed to care
+for him and was bustling about the room. During one of her absences he
+turned to Peter.
+
+“I suppose Marie hasn't been round?”
+
+“She came back last night.”
+
+“Did she tell you?”
+
+“Yes, poor child.”
+
+“She's a devil!” Stewart said, and lay silent. Then: “I saw her shoot
+that thing out in front of us, but there was no time--Where is she now?”
+
+“Marie? I sent her to Vienna.”
+
+Stewart fell back, relieved, not even curious.
+
+“Thank Heaven for that!” he said. “I don't want to see her again. I'd do
+something I'd be sorry for. The kindest thing to say for her is that she
+was not sane.”
+
+“No,” said Peter gravely, “she was hardly sane.”
+
+Stewart caught his steady gaze and glanced away. For him Marie's little
+tragedy had been written and erased. He would forget it magnanimously.
+He had divided what he had with her, and she had repaid him by
+attempting his life. And not only his life, but Anita's. Peter followed
+his line of reasoning easily.
+
+“It's quite a frequent complication, Stewart,” he said, “but every man
+to whom it happens regards himself more or less as a victim. She fell in
+love with you, that's all. Her conduct is contrary to the ethics of the
+game, but she's been playing poor cards all along.”
+
+“Where is she?”
+
+“That doesn't matter, does it?”
+
+Stewart had lain back and closed his eyes. No, it didn't matter. A sense
+of great relief overwhelmed him. Marie was gone, frightened into hiding.
+It was as if a band that had been about him was suddenly loosed: he
+breathed deep, he threw out his arms and laughed from sheer reaction.
+Then, catching Peter's not particularly approving eyes, he colored.
+
+“Good Lord, Peter!” he said, “you don't know what I've gone through with
+that little devil. And now she's gone!” He glanced round the disordered
+room, where bandages and medicines crowded toilet articles on the
+dressing-table, where one of Marie's small slippers still lay where it
+had fallen under the foot of the bed, where her rosary still hung over
+the corner of the table. “Ring for the maid, Peter, will you! I've got
+to get this junk out of here. Some of Anita's people may come.”
+
+During that afternoon ride, while the train clump-clumped down the
+mountains, Peter thought of all this. Some of Marie's “junk” was in his
+bag; her rosary lay in his breastpocket, along with the pin he had sent
+her at Christmas. Peter happened on it, still in its box, which looked
+as if it had been cried over. He had brought it with him. He admired it
+very much, and it had cost money he could ill afford to spend.
+
+It was late when the train drew into the station. Peter, encumbered with
+Marie's luggage and his own, lowered his window and added his voice
+to the chorus of plaintive calls: “Portier! Portier!” they shouted.
+“Portier!” bawled Peter.
+
+He was obliged to resort to the extravagance of a taxicab. Possibly
+a fiacre would have done as well, but it cost almost as much and was
+slower. Moments counted now: a second was an hour, an hour a decade. For
+he was on his way to Harmony. Extravagance became recklessness. As soon
+die for a sheep as a lamb! He stopped the taxicab and bought a bunch of
+violets, stopped again and bought lilies of the valley to combine with
+the violets, went out of his way to the American grocery and bought a
+jar of preserved fruit.
+
+By that time he was laden. The jar of preserves hung in one shabby
+pocket, Marie's rosary dangled from another; the violets were buttoned
+under his overcoat against the cold.
+
+At the very last he held the taxi an extra moment and darted into the
+delicatessen shop across the Siebensternstrasse. From there, standing
+inside the doorway, he could see the lights in the salon across the way,
+the glow of his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. Peter whistled,
+stamped his cold feet, quite neglected--in spite of repeated warnings
+from Harmony--to watch the Herr Schenkenkaufer weigh the cheese,
+accepted without a glance a ten-Kronen piece with a hole in it.
+
+“And how is the child to-day?” asked the Herr Schenkenkaufer, covering
+the defective gold piece with conversation.
+
+“I do not know; I have been away,” said Peter. He almost sang it.
+
+“All is well or I would have heard. Wilhelm the Portier was but just now
+here.”
+
+“All well, of course,” sang Peter, eyes on the comfortable Floor of
+his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. “Auf wiedersehen, Herr
+Schenkenkaufer.”
+
+“Auf wiedersehen, Herr Doktor.”
+
+Violets, lilies-of-the-valley, cheese, rosary, luggage--thus Peter
+climbed the stairs. The Portier wished to assist him, but Peter
+declined. The Portier was noisy. There was to be a moment when Peter,
+having admitted himself with extreme caution, would present himself
+without so much as a creak to betray him, would stand in a doorway until
+some one, Harmony perhaps--ah, Peter!--would turn and see him. She had a
+way of putting one slender hand over her heart when she was startled.
+
+Peter put down the jar of preserved peaches outside. It was to be a
+second surprise. Also he put down the flowers; they were to be brought
+in last of all. One surprise after another is a cumulative happiness.
+Peter did not wish to swallow all his cake in one bite.
+
+For once he did not slam the outer door, although he very nearly did,
+and only caught it at the cost of a bruised finger. Inside he listened.
+There was no clatter of dishes, no scurrying back and forth from table
+to stove in the final excitement of dishing up. There was, however,
+a highly agreeable odor of stewing chicken, a crisp smell of baking
+biscuit.
+
+In the darkened hall Peter had to pause to steady himself. For he had
+a sudden mad impulse to shout Harmony's name, to hold out his arms, to
+call her to him there in the warm darkness, and when she had come, to
+catch her to him, to tell his love in one long embrace, his arms about
+her, his rough cheek against her soft one. No wonder he grew somewhat
+dizzy and had to pull himself together.
+
+The silence rather surprised him, until he recalled that Harmony was
+probably sewing in the salon, as she did sometimes when dinner was ready
+to serve. The boy was asleep, no doubt. He stole along on tiptoe, hardly
+breathing, to the first doorway, which was Jimmy's.
+
+Jimmy was asleep. Round him were the pink and yellow and white flower
+fairies with violet heads. Peter saw them and smiled. Then, his eyes
+growing accustomed to the light, he saw Marie, face down on the floor,
+her head on her arms. Still as she was, Peter knew she was not sleeping,
+only fighting her battle over again and losing.
+
+Some of the joyousness of his return fled from Peter, never to come
+back. The two silent figures were too close to tragedy. Peter, with a
+long breath, stole past the door and on to the salon. No Harmony there,
+but the great room was warm and cheery. The table was drawn near the
+stove and laid for Abendessen. The white porcelain coffee-pot had
+boiled and extinguished itself, according to its method, and now gently
+steamed.
+
+On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted
+but burning low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little
+money--almost all he had left Harmony when he went away.
+
+Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
+discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the rooms
+revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at last the fact
+stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter refused to accept it. He
+sat for a half-hour or even more by the fire in the salon, obstinately
+refusing to believe she was gone, keeping the supper warm against her
+return. He did not think or reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing,
+hardly moving, save when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he
+was all alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
+outer door.
+
+The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by alarm.
+During all the time that followed, that condition persisted, fright,
+almost terror. Harmony alone in the city, helpless, dependent,
+poverty-stricken. Harmony seeking employment under conditions Peter knew
+too well. But with his alarm came rage.
+
+Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
+gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the
+frightened Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation after
+accusation against some unnamed woman to whom he applied epithets that
+Marie's English luckily did not comprehend. Not a particularly heroic
+figure was Peter that night: a frantic, disheveled individual, before
+whom the Portier cowered, who struggled back to sanity through a berserk
+haze and was liable to swift relapses into fury again.
+
+To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be Peter's
+for many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim determination to keep
+on searching.
+
+There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the cabstands in
+the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The delicatessen seller
+had seen her go out that afternoon with a bundle and return without it.
+She had been gone only an hour or so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that
+she might have found a haven in the neighborhood--until he recalled the
+parcel-post.
+
+One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief, but she
+had also offered the girl a home. She might be at the Boyers'. Peter,
+flinging on a hat and without his overcoat, went to the Boyers'. Time
+was valuable, and he had wasted an hour, two hours, in useless rage. So
+he took a taxicab, and being by this time utterly reckless of cost let
+it stand while he interviewed the Boyers.
+
+Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring. Peter
+was past explanation or ceremonial.
+
+“Is Harmony here?” he demanded.
+
+“Harmony?”
+
+“Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing.”
+
+“Come in,” said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. “I don't
+know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer.”
+
+During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the bedroom, and
+for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter suffered the tortures
+of the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had meant to say by way of protest at
+the intrusion on the sacred privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died
+in her throat. Her plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps
+with guilt. Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet
+story; Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her
+unstayed figure, listened.
+
+“I thought,” finished Peter, “that since you had offered her a
+refuge--from me--she might have come here.”
+
+“I offered her a refuge--before I had been to the Pension Schwarz.”
+
+“Ah!” said Peter slowly. “And what about the Pension Schwarz?”
+
+“Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am obliged
+to say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the girl come here I
+could hardly--Frank, I will speak!--I could hardly have taken her in.”
+
+Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling out
+into the hall again. There he thought of something to say in reply,
+repudiation, thought better of it, started down the stairs.
+
+Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he put his
+hand on Peter's shoulder. “You know, old man, I don't believe that.
+These women--”
+
+“I know,” said Peter simply. “Thank you. Good-night.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean, from
+Mrs. Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing herself,
+to cutting the threads that bound her to the life in the
+Siebensternstrasse. She had drawn all her money, as Peter discovered
+later. The discovery caused him even more acute anxiety. The city was
+full of thieves; poverty and its companion, crime, lurked on every
+shadowy staircase of the barracklike houses, or peered, red-eyed, from
+every alleyway.
+
+And into this city of contrasts--of gray women of the night hugging
+gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with loathsome gestures, of
+smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths under great mustaches, of dapper
+soldiers to whom the young girl unattended was potential prey, into
+this night city of terror, this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine
+rubbing elbows with frost-nipped flesh, destitution sauntering along
+the fashionable Prater for lack of shelter, gilt wheels of royalty and
+yellow wheels of courtesans--Harmony had ventured alone for the second
+time.
+
+And this time there was no Peter Byrne to accost her cheerily in the
+twilight and win her by sheer friendliness. She was alone. Her funds
+were lower, much lower. And something else had gone--her faith. Mrs.
+Boyer had seen to that. In the autumn Harmony had faced the city
+clear-eyed and unafraid; now she feared it, met it with averted eyes,
+alas! understood it.
+
+It was not the Harmony who had bade a brave farewell to Scatchy and the
+Big Soprano in the station who fled to her refuge on the upper floor of
+the house in the Wollbadgasse. This was a hunted creature, alternately
+flushed and pale, who locked her door behind her before she took off
+her hat, and who, having taken off her hat and surveyed her hiding-place
+with tragic eyes, fell suddenly to trembling, alone there in the
+gaslight.
+
+She had had no plans beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to think
+the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing to eat,
+and the single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no German. The
+dressmaker had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not know where to find
+a restaurant, was afraid to trust herself to the streets alone. She went
+to bed supperless, with a tiny picture of Peter and Jimmy and the wooden
+sentry under her cheek.
+
+The pigeons, cooing on the window-sill, wakened her early. She was
+confused at first, got up to see if Jimmy had thrown off his blankets,
+and wakened to full consciousness with the sickening realization that
+Jimmy was not there.
+
+The dressmaker, whose name was Monia Reiff, slept late after her evening
+out. Harmony, collapsing with hunger and faintness, waited as long as
+she could. Then she put on her things desperately and ventured out.
+Surely at this hour Peter would not be searching, and even if he were he
+would never think of the sixteenth district. He would make inquiries, of
+course--the Pension Schwarz, Boyers', the master's.
+
+The breakfast brought back her strength and the morning air gave her
+confidence. The district, too, was less formidable than the neighborhood
+of the Karntnerstrasse and the Graben. The shops were smaller. The
+windows exhibited cheaper goods. There was a sort of family atmosphere
+about many of them; the head of the establishment in the doorway, the
+wife at the cashier's desk, daughters, cousins, nieces behind the
+wooden counters. The shopkeepers were approachable, instead of familiar.
+Harmony met no rebuffs, was respectfully greeted and cheerfully listened
+to. In many cases the application ended in a general consultation,
+shopkeeper, wife, daughters, nieces, slim clerks with tiny mustaches.
+She got addresses, followed them up, more consultations, more addresses,
+but no work. The reason dawned on her after a day of tramping, during
+which she kept carefully away from that part of the city where Peter
+might be searching for her.
+
+The fact was, of course, that her knowledge of English was her sole
+asset as a clerk. And there were few English and no tourists in the
+sixteenth district. She was marketing a commodity for which there was no
+demand.
+
+She lunched at a Konditorei, more to rest her tired body than because
+she needed food. The afternoon was as the morning. At six o'clock,
+long after the midwinter darkness had fallen, she stumbled back to the
+Wollbadgasse and up the whitewashed staircase.
+
+She had a shock at the second landing. A man had stepped into the angle
+to let her pass. A gasjet dared over his head, and she recognized the
+short heavy figure and ardent eyes of Georgiev. She had her veil down
+luckily, and he gave no sign of recognition. She passed on, and she
+heard him a second later descending. But there had been something
+reminiscent after all in her figure and carriage. The little Georgiev
+paused, halfway down, and thought a moment. It was impossible, of
+course. All women reminded him of the American. Had he not, only the
+day before, followed for two city blocks a woman old enough to be
+his mother, merely because she carried a violin case? But there was
+something about the girl he had just passed--Bah!
+
+A bad week for Harmony followed, a week of weary days and restless
+nights when she slept only to dream of Peter--of his hurt and
+incredulous eyes when he found she had gone; of Jimmy--that he needed
+her, was worse, was dying. More than once she heard him sobbing and
+wakened to the cooing of the pigeons on the window-sill. She grew thin
+and sunken-eyed; took to dividing her small hoard, half of it with her,
+half under the carpet, so that in case of accident all would not be
+gone.
+
+This, as it happened, was serious. One day, the sixth, she came back wet
+to the skin from an all-day rain, to find that the carpet bank had been
+looted. There was no clue. The stolid Hungarian, startled out of her
+lethargy, protested innocence; the little dressmaker, who seemed honest
+and friendly, wept in sheer sympathy. The fact remained--half the small
+hoard was gone.
+
+Two days more, a Sunday and a Monday. On Sunday Harmony played, and
+Georgiev in the room below, translating into cipher a recent conference
+between the Austrian Minister of War and the German Ambassador, put
+aside his work and listened. She played, as once before she had played
+when life seemed sad and tragic, the “Humoresque.” Georgiev, hands
+behind his head and eyes upturned, was back in the Pension Schwarz that
+night months ago when Harmony played the “Humoresque” and Peter stooped
+outside her door. The little Bulgarian sighed and dreamed.
+
+Harmony, a little sadder, a little more forlorn each day, pursued her
+hopeless quest. She ventured into the heart of the Stadt and paid a
+part of her remaining money to an employment bureau, to teach English
+or violin, whichever offered, or even both. After she had paid they told
+her it would be difficult, almost impossible without references. She had
+another narrow escape as she was leaving. She almost collided with Olga,
+the chambermaid, who, having clashed for the last time with Katrina, was
+seeking new employment. On another occasion she saw Marie in the crowd
+and was obsessed with a longing to call to her, to ask for Peter, for
+Jimmy. That meeting took the heart out of the girl. Marie was white and
+weary--perhaps the boy was worse. Perhaps Peter--Her heart contracted.
+But that was absurd, of course, Peter was always well and strong.
+
+Two things occurred that week, one unexpected, the other inevitable.
+The unexpected occurrence was that Monia Reiff, finding Harmony being
+pressed for work, offered the girl a situation. The wage was small, but
+she could live on it.
+
+The inevitable was that she met Georgiev on the stairs without her veil.
+
+It was the first day in the workroom. The apprentices were carrying home
+boxes for a ball that night. Thread was needed, and quickly. Harmony,
+who did odds and ends of sewing, was most easily spared. She slipped on
+her jacket and hat and ran down to the shop near by.
+
+It was on the return that she met Georgiev coming down. The afternoon
+was dark and the staircase unlighted. In the gloom one face was as
+another. Georgiev, listening intently, hearing footsteps, drew back
+into the embrasure of a window and waited. His swarthy face was tense,
+expectant. As the steps drew near, were light feminine instead of
+stealthy, the little spy relaxed somewhat. But still he waited,
+crouched.
+
+It was a second before he recognized Harmony, another instant before he
+realized his good fortune. She had almost passed. He put out an unsteady
+hand.
+
+“Fraulein!”
+
+“Herr Georgiev!”
+
+The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes gleamed.
+He struggled against the barrier of language, broke out in passionate
+Bulgar, switched to German punctuated with an English word here and
+there. Made intelligible, it was that he had found her at last. Harmony
+held her spools of thread and waited for the storm of languages to
+subside. Then:--
+
+“But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev.”
+
+“No?”
+
+Harmony colored.
+
+“I am--am hiding,” she explained. “Something very uncomfortable happened
+and I came here. Please don't say you have seen me.”
+
+Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly, with his
+ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed of course. His
+incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had actually been in the
+same building with him while he sought her everywhere else.
+
+“Then,” he said at last, “it was you who played Sunday.”
+
+“I surely.”
+
+She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.
+
+“Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?”
+
+“We shall meet again, of course.”
+
+“Fraulein,--with all respect,--sometime perhaps you will walk out with
+me?”
+
+“I am very busy all day.”
+
+“At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect, Fraulein!”
+
+Harmony was touched.
+
+“Sometime,” she consented. And then impulsively: “I am very lonely, Herr
+Georgiev.”
+
+She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and kissed
+it reverently. The Herr Georgiev's father was a nobleman in his own
+country, and all the little spy's training had been to make of a girl
+in Harmony's situation lawful prey. But in the spy's glowing heart there
+was nothing for Harmony to fear. She knew it. He stood, hat in hand,
+while she went up the staircase. Then:--
+
+“Fraulein!” anxiously.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours hat?”
+
+“I saw no one there.”
+
+“I thank you, Fraulein.”
+
+He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows,
+listened until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he clapped
+his hat on his head and made his cautious way down to the street. There
+was no man in a green velours hat below, but the little spy had an
+uneasy feeling that eyes watched him, nevertheless. Life was growing
+complicated for the Herr Georgiev.
+
+Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a life she
+had never touched before. She discovered, after a day or two in the
+work-room, that Monia Reiff's business lay almost altogether among the
+demi-monde. The sewing-girls, of Marie's type many of them, found in
+the customers endless topics of conversation. Some things Harmony was
+spared, much of the talk being in dialect. But a great deal of it she
+understood, and she learned much that was not spoken. They talked
+freely of the women, their clothes, and they talked a great deal about
+a newcomer, an American dancer, for whom Monia was making an elaborate
+outfit. The American's name was Lillian Le Grande. She was dancing at
+one of the variety theaters.
+
+Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman--a gold brocade
+slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of bodice made of
+gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with Georgiev she met her.
+
+There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping. Monia,
+flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and glanced over the
+girls. She singled out Harmony finally and called her.
+
+“Come and put on the American's gown,” she ordered. “She wishes--Heaven
+knows what she wishes!”
+
+Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein Le
+Grande had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when she found
+herself obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one terrible moment
+before the little dressmaker's amused eyes.
+
+“Thou art very lovely, very chic,” said Monia. The dress added to
+rather than relieved Harmony's discomfiture. She donned it in one of the
+fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining off a corner
+of the large reception room. The slashed skirt embarrassed her; the low
+cut made her shrink. Monia was frankly entranced. Above the gold tissue
+of the bodice rose Harmony's exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold;
+even her eyes looked golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave
+a pull here, a pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the
+things she made!
+
+She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind the
+curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit more of
+the girl's rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the curtain aside
+and stood smiling.
+
+Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second's silence. Then:--
+
+“Exquisite!” she said in English. Then in halting German: “Do not change
+a line. It is perfect.”
+
+Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a glimpse of
+herself and was startled. She had been wearing black for so long, and
+now this radiant golden creature was herself. She was enchanted and
+abashed. The slash in the skirt troubled her: her slender leg had a way
+of revealing itself.
+
+The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered another
+gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the dress and into
+her own shabby frock. On the other side of the curtain the dancer
+was talking. Her voice was loud, but rather agreeable. She smoked a
+cigarette. Scraps of chatter came to Harmony, and once a laugh.
+
+“That is too pink--something more delicate.”
+
+“Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek.”
+
+“I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night.”
+
+“Still no news, Fraulein?”
+
+“None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn't so bad, is it? I could use
+more rouge.”
+
+“It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child could be
+stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!”
+
+The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became nasal,
+full of venom.
+
+“Oh, they know well enough,” she snapped. “Those nurses know, and
+there's a pig of a red-bearded doctor--I'd like to poison him.
+Separating mother and child! I'm going to find him, if only to show them
+they are not so smart after all.”
+
+In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her curtain,
+had clutched at her heart. Jimmy's mother!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony's flight had had nothing to do
+with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and
+besides Peter had indicated that Harmony's absence was purely temporary.
+But the breaking-up was inevitable. All day long the child lay in the
+white bed, apathetic but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies
+for his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite tame, played
+hide-and-seek over the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his
+frantic search for Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to
+him.
+
+He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no
+apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried obediently
+to eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg to be
+taken into the salon, as he once had done. There was a sort of mental
+confusion also. He liked Marie to read his father's letters; but as
+he grew weaker the occasional confusing of Peter with his dead father
+became a fixed idea. Peter was Daddy.
+
+Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony's adjacent
+room and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he
+put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth
+sofa at the foot of Jimmy's bed--lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he
+that the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its
+slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in
+every night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp
+in his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy's thin little
+chest. Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the ears and
+developed lines about his mouth that never left him again. He felt gray
+and old, and sometimes bitter and hard also. The boy's condition could
+not be helped: it was inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was
+eating his heart out had been unnecessary and cruel.
+
+Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he
+wondered how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he hoped
+it was bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night, when the
+lamp burned low and gusts of wind shook the old house, fearful thoughts
+came to him--the canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought reason,
+however. Harmony had been too rational, too sane for such an end.
+
+McLean was Peter's great support in those terrible days. He was young
+and hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to grease the
+machinery of the police service; McLean could and did. In Berlin Harmony
+could not have remained hidden for two days. In Vienna, however, it
+was different. Returns were made to the department, but irregularly.
+An American music student was missing. There were thousands of American
+music students in the city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses.
+McLean offered a reward and followed up innumerable music students.
+
+The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became old and
+haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this difference,
+that with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day.
+With McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following
+morning he went to work with renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after
+all, the iron had not struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a
+life-and-death matter.
+
+Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work. The
+little household went on methodically. Marie remained; there had seemed
+nothing else to do. She cooked Peter's food--what little he would eat;
+she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept
+the apartment neat. She was never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed,
+she seemed to have lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely
+to Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in
+spite of his protests.
+
+The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been music and
+Harmony's soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with
+Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier
+had once vibrated in response to Harmony's violin, almost absolute
+silence now reigned. Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer
+creaked, and the loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had
+been silenced out of deference to the sick child.
+
+On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy's
+mother in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day. McLean
+had sent him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect
+that a young girl answering Harmony's description had been seen in the
+park at Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.
+
+Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had gone out
+together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And it had been as he
+feared--a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing her
+hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.
+
+McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak.
+Then back to the city again.
+
+He had taken to making a daily round, to the master's, to the Frau
+Professor Bergmeister's, along the Graben and the Karntnerstrasse,
+ending up at the Doctors' Club in the faint hope of a letter. Wrath
+still smouldered deep in Peter; he would not enter a room at the club
+if Mrs. Boyer sat within. He had had a long hour with Dr. Jennings,
+and left that cheerful person writhing in abasement. And he had held
+a stormy interview with the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for
+a week, and exceedingly nervous, being of the impression from Peter's
+manner that in the event of Harmony not turning up an American gunboat
+would sail up the right arm of the Danube and bombard the Pension
+Schwarz.
+
+Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the city
+in the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean's elasticity was
+deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into crowds, had taken on a
+strained, concentrated look.
+
+Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man's ultrafashionable
+dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms dangling between his knees,
+his head down. Their common trouble had drawn the two together, or had
+drawn McLean close to Peter, as if he recognized that there were degrees
+in grief and that Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old
+rage at Peter had died. Harmony's flight had proved the situation as no
+amount of protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the
+girl; then he and Peter would start even, and the battle to the best
+man.
+
+They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since he sat
+down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted down from day
+to day such details of their search as might be worth keeping. Now and
+then he glanced at Peter as if he wished to say something, hesitated,
+fell to work again over the notebook. Finally he ventured.
+
+“How's the boy?”
+
+“Not so well to-day. I'm having a couple of men in to see him to-night.
+He doesn't sleep.”
+
+“Do you sleep?”
+
+“Not much. He's on my mind, of course.”
+
+That and other things, Peter.
+
+“Don't you think--wouldn't it be better to have a nurse. You can't go
+like this all day and be up all night, you know. And Marie has him most
+of the day.” McLean, of course, had known Marie before. “The boy ought
+to have a nurse, I think.”
+
+“He doesn't move without my hearing him.”
+
+“That's an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?”
+
+Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which exasperation
+struggled with fatigue.
+
+“Good Lord, boy,” he rasped, “don't you suppose I'd have a nurse if I
+could afford it?”
+
+“Would you let me help? I'd like to do something. I'm a useless cub in
+a sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked in the
+hospital?”
+
+“Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I shouldn't
+let you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but--if he would be
+happier--”
+
+“That's settled, then,” said McLean. “Nurse Elisabet, if she can come.
+And--look here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for a week and
+haven't had the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it
+back when you get it, any time, a year or ten years. I'll not miss it.”
+
+But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
+
+“I can't take anything now,” he said. “But I'll remember it, and if
+things get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to live.
+Marie is a good manager, almost as good as--Harmony was.” This with
+difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat
+seemed to close on the name.
+
+That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to
+see Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know,
+would never notice.
+
+At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev,
+got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the
+platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going
+well with him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face
+suspiciously, until they came to a rest on Peter.
+
+It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits
+he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's
+despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a
+touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination,
+recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension
+Schwarz--and built him a little story that was not far from the truth.
+
+Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade,
+when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people,
+when Demel's was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with
+military men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when
+the flower women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in
+roses, when sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the
+Cathedral, when the lottery did the record business of the day.
+
+It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might
+happen on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as in a
+crowd, with people close, touching her, men staring at her, following
+her. He had spent a frightful night in the Opera, scanning seat after
+seat, not so much because he hoped to find her as because inaction was
+intolerable.
+
+And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the
+Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He even
+peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared
+that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in
+the early days of the winter.
+
+Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because
+of the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place
+where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where
+because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as
+it passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser's window, where a
+brilliant light shone on each face that passed.
+
+Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the
+desk spoke of him: “He is there again, the gray man!”
+
+“Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!”
+
+“Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.”
+
+“More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American.”
+
+“He is Russian. Look at his size.”
+
+“But his shoes!” triumphantly. “They are American, little one.”
+
+The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden
+rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.
+
+“I think he is of the police,” she said, “or a spy. There is much talk
+of war.”
+
+“Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such
+sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white.”
+
+“The rose, Fraulein.”
+
+The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer.
+The customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange
+intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious
+clutch at her heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to
+fetch the golden rose that was to complete Le Grande's costume.
+
+She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another
+exit.
+
+She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of
+Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking
+along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and
+steady ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.
+
+It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed
+to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for
+her. And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even
+then he had not said he loved her--had not even known it, to be exact.
+Nor had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him
+out of her life.
+
+The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so
+enlightening as to poor Peter's quest, that Peter was growing thin and
+white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own
+position to realize Peter's. With the glimpse of him came a great
+longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy's arms about
+her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating
+harmlessly against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the
+brick stove, for Peter.
+
+Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant,
+at the best, adding to Peter's burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the
+old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the
+respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What
+if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not
+let his mother see him!
+
+Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom
+until eight o'clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked
+over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had
+seen him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping
+watch over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady
+eyes for her.
+
+No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the
+sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places.
+But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her,
+became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see
+once again the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp, the flicker that was
+the fire.
+
+She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She
+put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.
+
+The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted.
+She achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car
+was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was
+white and frightened when she reached the car.
+
+The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
+delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light
+was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the
+money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
+
+The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
+the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky,
+its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by
+the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her.
+Peter's lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight
+from the salon windows. The light was not regular--it disappeared at
+regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some
+one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and
+forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always
+paced the door.
+
+She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
+falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
+cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower
+and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure.
+No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in
+the wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to
+the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of
+the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.
+
+Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's
+windows--and Peter's--opened toward the back of the house, where in
+a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and
+where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless
+desire to see at least the light from the child's room possessed
+Harmony. Even the light would be something; to go like this, to carry
+with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was
+unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden
+and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be
+something.
+
+She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for
+her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her
+window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours
+of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So
+Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the
+corner of the old lodge and thus to the courtyard.
+
+Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving
+shadows; on Jimmy's window-sill a jar of milk. And voices--some one was
+singing.
+
+Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to
+sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little
+song Harmony had been wont to sing:--
+
+“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human
+eyes. And in the--hereafter--angels may
+
+    Roll--the--stone--from--its--grave--away.”
+
+Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether.
+Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down
+the gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a
+minute, two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks
+of the Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old
+city, so very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.
+
+Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away.
+Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood
+by the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered
+Harmony somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the
+night before he went away:--
+
+“Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony.”
+
+The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the
+great tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below.
+Peter struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated
+his face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.
+
+“Good-night, Peter,” whispered Harmony. “Good-night, dear.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by
+relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about
+again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little
+less florid. But the week's confinement had given him an opportunity to
+think over many things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he
+had packed up the last of Marie's small belongings and sent them down to
+Vienna.
+
+Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. “Just how much talk do you
+suppose this has made, Byrne?” he asked.
+
+“Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it,
+you know.”
+
+Stewart's brows contracted.
+
+“Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!”
+
+“Probably.”
+
+Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she had
+been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.
+
+“Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?”
+
+“No,” doggedly.
+
+“I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but--you can't get away with
+it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another.”
+
+“What's that?”
+
+“Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and
+not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to
+it.”
+
+“She wouldn't understand in a thousand years.”
+
+“Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea
+that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow.
+A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a
+man has done with his life before a girl--the right girl--comes into
+it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life
+then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she
+chooses.”
+
+“How many would choose under those circumstances?” he jibed.
+
+Peter smiled. “Quite a few,” he said cheerfully. “It's a wrong system,
+of course; but we can get a little truth out of it.”
+
+“You can't get away with it” stuck in Stewart's mind for several days.
+It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had
+recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell
+Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the
+affair against his conscience and came out victorious.
+
+Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they
+complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the
+bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by
+midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid
+citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her
+traveling. In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in
+the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take
+the baths.
+
+It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after
+the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon's treatment called
+for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and
+rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is
+the remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with
+any hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and
+looked haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to
+leave.
+
+He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and
+mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was
+quiet, and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita's sitting
+room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer
+chair.
+
+Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond
+and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses
+along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light
+was extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train
+crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling
+from burrow to burrow.
+
+The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her
+there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were
+times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked
+into hers with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would
+glance away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps
+the situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her
+by its unusualness.
+
+To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely,
+without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for
+something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than
+ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the
+thing, of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita,
+barely twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the
+world, not so deep as Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would
+have been merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In
+that case she might be less than just, or more.
+
+Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech,
+very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at,
+keenly alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew
+not what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully
+potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger
+on her arm.
+
+He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story--a preamble about his
+upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna,
+his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From
+that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.
+
+It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through
+love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of
+fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him,
+this first evening absolutely alone with her. That and her nearness, and
+the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm. Still he had not touched her.
+
+The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that. General
+credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first. How
+many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from
+chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips
+last. The woman is in his arms before he tells his love. It is by her
+response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the
+thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct.
+Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl's hand, gained
+an encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no
+rebuff would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words?
+They would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify
+it.
+
+But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness stood
+between them and must be painfully taken down.
+
+“I'm afraid this is stupid for you,” said Anita out of the silence.
+“Would you like to go to the music-room?”
+
+“God forbid. I was thinking.”
+
+“Of what?” Encouragement this, surely.
+
+“I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up.”
+
+“Really? I?”
+
+“You know that.”
+
+“How did I stir it up?”
+
+“That's hardly the way I meant to put it. You've changed everything for
+me. I care for you--a very great deal.”
+
+He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he did not
+touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in this fashion, or
+was he making love?
+
+“I'm very glad you like me.”
+
+“Like you!” Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice was
+unmistakable. “It's much more than that, Anita, so much more that I'm
+going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help a little?”
+
+“Yes, if I can.” She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.
+
+Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face set and
+dogged.
+
+“Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?”
+
+“No. There's a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all these
+places, isn't there?”
+
+“This was not an accident.”
+
+“No?”
+
+“The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send us
+over the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime.”
+
+After a brief silence--
+
+“Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?”
+
+“Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman--a girl, Anita. A girl I
+had been living with.”
+
+A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For he was
+quivering with dread when he said it--the courage of the man who faces
+a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would have broken into
+speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and was silent. Stewart
+watched her as best he could in the darkness, trying to gather further
+courage to go on. He could not see her face, but her fingers, touching
+the edge of the chair, quivered.
+
+“May I tell you the rest?”
+
+“I don't think I want to hear it.”
+
+“Are you going to condemn me unheard?”
+
+“There isn't anything you can say against the fact?”
+
+But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he made
+his plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what had happened
+simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort. And he emphasized the
+lack of sentiment that prompted the arrangement.
+
+Anita spoke then for the first time: “And when you tried to terminate it
+she attempted to kill you!”
+
+“I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then neglected her
+for you.”
+
+“Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her.”
+
+“It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear that,
+Anita. But lately, in the last month or two, she--I suppose I should
+have seen that she--”
+
+“That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?”
+
+“Nineteen.”
+
+A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had watched her
+with wide, almost childish eyes.
+
+“Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train coming
+up?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Where is she now?”
+
+“In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came up
+to see me after the--after the accident, sent her away. I think he's
+looking after her. I haven't heard from him.”
+
+“Why did you tell me all this?”
+
+“Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me.”
+
+“What! After that?”
+
+“That, or something similar, is in many men's lives. They don't tell it,
+that's the difference. I 'm not taking any credit for telling you this.
+I'm ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when I look at your bandaged
+arm I'm suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to tell you. He said I couldn't
+get away with it; some time or other it would come out. Then he said
+something else. He said you'd probably understand, and that if you
+married me it was better to start with a clean slate.”
+
+No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of fact, an
+offer--his past against hers, his future with hers. Her hand was steady
+now. The light in the priest's house had been extinguished. The chill of
+the mountain night penetrated Anita's white furs; and set her--or was it
+the chill?--to shivering.
+
+“If I had not told you, would you have married me?”
+
+“I think so. I'll be honest, too. Yes.”
+
+“I am the same man you would have married. Only--more honest.”
+
+“I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold.”
+
+Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas hugged
+the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside was the little
+balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing and looked down,
+down. Some of the arrogance of his new virtue left the man. He was
+suddenly humbled. For the first time he realized a part of what Marie
+had endured in that small room where the light burned.
+
+“Poor little Marie!” he said softly.
+
+The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he could have
+made. Anita rose and held out her hand.
+
+“Go and see her,” she said quietly. “You owe her that. We'll be leaving
+here in a day or so and I'll not see you again. But you've been honest,
+and I will be honest, too. I--I cared a great deal, too.”
+
+“And this has killed it?”
+
+“I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think.”
+
+“But if you are going away--I'm afraid to leave you. You'll think this
+thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you've been taught will
+come--”
+
+“Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise.”
+
+He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.
+
+“I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?” humbly.
+
+“I do not want you to kiss me.”
+
+He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the darkness. If
+he could only have crushed her to him, made her feel the security of his
+love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier of his own building was
+between them. His voice was husky.
+
+“I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the thing
+that concerns us both--I love you. I never loved the other woman. I
+never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing more like that.”
+
+“I shall try to remember.”
+
+Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the doctor
+and the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart again. But
+before she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre at the door, she
+went out on the terrace, and looked across to the Villa Waldheim, rising
+from among its clustering trees. Although it was too far to be certain,
+she thought she saw the figure of a man on the little balcony standing
+with folded arms, gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.
+
+Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his promise
+in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of the following
+day, for Vienna. The strain of the confession was over, but he was a
+victim of sickening dread. To one thing only he dared to pin his hopes.
+Anita had said she cared, cared a great deal. And, after all, what else
+mattered? The story had been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of
+queer ideas of right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!
+
+He arrived in Vienna at nine o'clock that night. The imminence of
+his interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a hurried
+supper, and calling up the Doctors' Club by telephone found Peter's
+address in the Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea, of course, that Marie
+was there. He wanted to see Peter to learn where Marie had taken refuge,
+and incidentally to get from Peter a fresh supply of moral courage for
+the interview. For he needed courage. In vain on the journey down had he
+clothed himself in armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment
+in the train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a
+luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this station she
+had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a nap. Ah, but again,
+at this part of the journey he had first seen Anita!
+
+He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter's manner
+of living those days was exceedingly vague. He had respected Peter's
+reticence, after the manner of men with each other. Peter had once
+mentioned a boy he was looking after, in excuse for leaving so soon
+after the accident. That was all.
+
+The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted. The
+street was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart found the
+gate. Even then he lost the path, and found himself among a group of
+trees, to touch the lowest branches of any of which resulted in a shower
+of raindrops. To add to his discomfort some one was walking in the
+garden, coming toward him with light, almost stealthy steps.
+
+Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached, were
+very close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness that even then
+all he saw was a blacker shadow, and that was visible only because it
+moved. Then a hand touched his arm, stopped as if paralyzed, drew back
+slowly, fearfully.
+
+“Good Heavens!” said poor Harmony faintly.
+
+“Please don't be alarmed. I have lost the path.” Stewart's voice was
+almost equally nervous. “Is it to the right or the left?”
+
+It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:--
+
+“To the right a dozen paces or so.”
+
+“Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it.”
+
+“I know it quite well. Please don't bother.”
+
+The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn on
+Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking God's own
+language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance, they made the path.
+
+“The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order.”
+
+“Are you not coming in?”
+
+“No. I--I do not live here.”
+
+She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark facade
+of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment later heard
+the closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort of curious place
+was this, a great looming house that concealed in its garden a fugitive
+American girl who came and went like a shadow, leaving only the memory
+of a sweet voice strained with fright?
+
+Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the Portier
+gave him and followed the gentleman's gruff directions up the staircase.
+Peter admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as well he might with Marie
+in the salon.
+
+Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter's expression. He shook the
+rain off his hat, smiling.
+
+“How are you?” asked Peter dutifully.
+
+“Pretty good, except for a headache when I'm tired. What sort of a place
+have you got here anyhow, Byrne?”
+
+“Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,” replied Peter, still preoccupied
+with Marie and what was coming. “Rather interesting old place.”
+
+“Rather,” commented Stewart, “with goddesses in the garden and all the
+usual stunts.”
+
+“Goddesses?”
+
+“Ran into one just now among the trees. 'A woman I forswore, but thou
+being a goddess I forswore not thee.' English-speaking goddess, by
+George!”
+
+Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and grasped
+his arm in fingers of steel.
+
+“For Heaven's sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in the
+garden?”
+
+Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle a
+situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.
+
+“I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke through a
+hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the compass--”
+
+Peter's fingers closed.
+
+“Quick,” he said.
+
+Stewart's manner lost its jauntiness.
+
+“There was a girl there,” he said shortly. “Couldn't see her. She spoke
+English. Said she didn't live here, and broke for the gate the minute I
+got to the path.”
+
+“You didn't see her?”
+
+“No. Nice voice, though. Young.”
+
+The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was running
+down the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to the Portier to
+unlock the door, was a madman in everything but purpose. The Portier let
+him out and returned to the bedroom.
+
+“The boy above is worse,” he said briefly. “A strange doctor has just
+come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug store.”
+
+The Portier's wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled her
+eyes.
+
+“What can one expect?” she demanded. “The good Herr Gott has forbidden
+theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the druggist has gone to
+visit his wife's mother.”
+
+“Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up.”
+
+“And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I shall
+go.”
+
+Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.
+
+Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found Peter's
+excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived, an old house,
+isolated in a garden where rambled young women with soft voices. Hello,
+a youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.
+
+He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie. The place
+was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the indescribable odor of
+drugs that meant illness. He remembered that the boy was frail.
+
+Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose,
+white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each other.
+Marie's crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger than speech. It
+was after a distinct pause that she spoke.
+
+“Hast thou brought the police?”
+
+Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart's mental
+condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it was with
+tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And yet--
+
+“So it's old Peter now, is it?”
+
+“No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all. I swear
+it. I look after the boy.”
+
+“Who else is here?”
+
+“No one else; but--”
+
+“Tell that rot to some one who does not know you.”
+
+“It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not lie.”
+ There was a catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men somewhat, but she
+still cherished the feminine belief that jealousy is love, whereas it is
+only injured pride. She took a step toward him. “Walter, I am sorry. Do
+you hate me?” She had dropped the familiar “thou.”
+
+Stewart crossed the room until only Peter's table and lamp stood between
+them.
+
+“I didn't mean to be brutal,” he said, rather largely, entirely
+conscious of his own magnanimity. “It was pretty bad up there and I
+know it. I don't hate you, of course. That's hardly possible
+after--everything.”
+
+“You--would take me back?”
+
+“No. It's over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that's all; to
+see that you were comfortable and not frightened. You're a silly child
+to think of the police.”
+
+Marie put a hand to her throat.
+
+“It is the American, of course.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. “Then I wish I had
+killed her!”
+
+No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman for her
+rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation in hand and
+Marie only feebly formidable, was rather amused and flattered by the
+honest fury in her voice. The mouse was under his paw; he would play a
+bit. “You'll get over feeling that way, kid. You don't really love me.”
+
+“You were my God, that is all.”
+
+“Will you let me help you--money, I mean?”
+
+“Keep it for her.”
+
+“Peter will be here in a minute.” He bent over the table and eyed her
+with his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. “Come round here and
+kiss me for old times.”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Come.”
+
+She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a step or
+two toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew himself up.
+
+“You are quite right and I'm a rotter.” Marie's English did not
+comprehend “rotter,” but she knew the tone. “Listen, Marie, I've told
+the other girl, and there's a chance for me, anyhow. Some day she may
+marry me. She asked me to see you.”
+
+“I do not wish her pity.”
+
+“You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say, without a
+dot. There is a chance in America for a clever girl. You are clever,
+little Marie. The first money I can spare I'll send you--if you'll take
+it. It's all I can do.”
+
+This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled from
+him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an explanation.
+When at last she understood that he was sincere, she broke down.
+Stewart, playing a new part and raw in it, found the situation
+irritating. But Marie's tears were not entirely bitter. Back of them her
+busy young mind was weaving a new warp of life, with all of America for
+its loom. Hope that had died lived again. Before her already lay that
+great country where women might labor and live by the fruit of their
+labor, where her tawdry past would be buried in the center of distant
+Europe. New life beckoned to the little Marie that night in the old
+salon of Maria Theresa, beckoned to her as it called to Stewart,
+opportunity to one, love and work to the other. To America!
+
+“I will go,” she said at last simply. “And I will not trouble you
+there.”
+
+“Good!” Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick
+gesture she held it to her cheek, dropped it.
+
+Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He had
+not found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well, still in
+Vienna, and--she had come back! She had cared then enough to come back.
+To-morrow he would commence again, would comb the city fine, and when
+he had found her he would bring her back, the wanderer, to a marvelous
+welcome.
+
+He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few
+belongings by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still stained
+with tears but radiant with hope.
+
+“Peter,” she said gravely, “I must prepare my outfit. I go to America.”
+
+“With Stewart?”
+
+“Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am very
+happy, although--Peter, may I kiss you?”
+
+“Certainly,” said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her thin
+shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who had cared
+enough to come back.
+
+“Life,” said Peter soberly, “life is just one damned thing after
+another, isn't it?”
+
+But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.
+
+The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She said:--
+
+“I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt you
+very much--but not, believe me, without hurting myself. Perhaps my
+uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing you, that I am not
+so big as you thought I would be. For now, in this final letter, I can
+tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear, I did care!
+
+“But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have gone
+very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy as I have
+does not support me to-night, that all my little rules of life are
+inadequate. Individual liberty was one--but there is no liberty of the
+individual. Life--other lives--press too closely. You, living your life
+as seemed best and easiest, and carrying down with you into shipwreck
+the little Marie and--myself!
+
+“For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It is not
+only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady revolt
+and loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest before one
+succumbs to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred that is a part of
+me and that would never forget.
+
+“You say that you are the same man I would have married, only more
+honest for concealing nothing. But--and forgive me this, it insists on
+coming up in my mind--were you honest, really? You told me, and it took
+courage, but wasn't it partly fear? What motive is unmixed? Honesty--and
+fear, Walter. You were preparing against a contingency, although you may
+not admit this to yourself.
+
+“I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am only
+trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break is final. The
+revolt is in myself, against something sordid and horrible which I will
+not take into my life. And for that reason time will make no difference.
+
+“I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great deal of
+this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter--home and children, the
+love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals. And you ask me to
+start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know you are resentful, but--I
+know that you understand.
+
+“ANITA.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine was
+threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with Bulgaria
+sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing troops, and there
+were long conferences in the Burg between the Emperor and various
+bearded gentlemen, while the military prayed in the churches for war.
+
+The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on all day
+in the small room below Harmony's on the Wollbadgasse. At night,
+when the man in the green velours hat took a little sleep, mysterious
+packages were carried down the whitewashed staircase and loaded into
+wagons waiting below. Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the
+pigeons a carrier pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.
+
+On the morning after Harmony's flight from the garden in the Street
+of Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She had put in
+a sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She charged herself with
+cowardice in running away from Peter and Jimmy when they needed her, and
+in going back like a thief the night before. The conviction that the boy
+was not so well brought with it additional introspection--her sacrifice
+seemed useless, almost childish. She had fled because two men thought
+it necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and she
+did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had promised
+herself, had been promised. But this career, for which she had given up
+everything else--would she find it in the workroom of a dressmaker?
+
+Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose--how her cheeks burned
+when she thought of it!--suppose she had taken Peter at his word and
+married him? What about Peter's career? Was there any way by which
+Peter's poverty for one would be comfort for two? Was there any
+reason why Peter, with his splendid ability, should settle down to the
+hack-work of general practice, the very slough out of which he had so
+painfully climbed?
+
+Either of two things--go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or stay
+where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew. There in
+the little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held out her arms
+longingly. “Peter!” she said. “Peter, dear!”
+
+She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no one.
+The instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at any cost
+outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard and tired, looking
+out. It was Harmony's chance, perhaps, to do a big thing; to prove
+herself bigger than her fears, stronger than convention. But she was
+young, bewildered, afraid. And there was this element, stronger than
+any of the others--Peter had never told her he loved her. To go back,
+throwing herself again on his mercy, was unthinkable. On his love--that
+was different. But what if he did not love her? He had been good to her;
+but then Peter was good to every one.
+
+There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his mother?
+Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose he were to die
+and his mother not see him? Harmony's sense of fairness rebelled. In the
+small community at home mother was sacred, her claims insistent.
+
+It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on the sill;
+over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous strip foretold the
+sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the market, lumbered along the
+streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony rose and lighted her fire, drew on
+her slippers and the faded silk kimono with the pink butterflies.
+
+In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early morning
+dreams of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining customers.
+
+Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in order, fed
+the pigeons,--it was then she saw the carrier with its message,--made
+her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside the stove. And all the
+time, moving quietly through her morning routine, she was there in that
+upper room in body only.
+
+In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in the
+Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the hutch, and
+Peter, with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed, toilet-table,
+coffee-pot, Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise over the church roof,
+and Peter again. Always Peter!
+
+Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear her,
+muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the Hungarian
+maid for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one of her new
+duties to prepare the workroom for the day. The luminous streak above
+the church was rose now, time for the day to begin.
+
+She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the door, so
+faint was the sound.
+
+She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony, expecting
+Monia, called “Come in.”
+
+It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face. He
+stood in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear toward the
+stairway. It was very silent. Monia was drinking her coffee in bed,
+whither she had retired for warmth.
+
+“Pardon!” said the Bulgarian in a whisper. “I listened until I heard you
+moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!”
+
+“Something has happened!” exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter, of
+course.
+
+“Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor to
+open your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I fear--on
+the sill, Fraulein.”
+
+Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once, but the
+carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and set about its
+breakfast.
+
+“Will he let me catch him?”
+
+“Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter--”
+
+“Come in, of course.”
+
+Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A handful of
+grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown! Georgiev caught
+the pigeon and drew the message from the tube. Even Harmony grasped the
+seriousness of the situation. The little Bulgarian's face, from gray
+became livid; tiny beads of cold sweat came out on his forehead.
+
+“What have I done?” cried Harmony. “Oh, what have I done? If I had known
+about the pigeon--”
+
+Georgiev recovered himself.
+
+“The Fraulein can do nothing wrong,” he said. “It is a matter of an
+hour's delay, that is all. It may not be too late.”
+
+Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee. The
+sulky Hungarian brought it without a glance in their direction.
+
+“Too late for what?”
+
+“Fraulein, if I may trouble you--but glance from the window to the
+street below. It is of an urgency, or I--Please, Fraulein!”
+
+Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind
+her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in her head.
+
+“Only a man in a green hat,” she said. “And down the street a group of
+soldiers.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.
+
+“They are coming for you?”
+
+“It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna.”
+
+“And I with the pigeon--Oh, it's too horrible! Herr Georgiev, stay here
+in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is mine--”
+
+“Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the
+pigeon. It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but a
+matter of--imprisonment.”
+
+“There must be something I can do,” desperately. “I hear them below. Is
+there no way to the roof, no escape?”
+
+“None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of
+peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you.”
+
+“You are not going down!”
+
+“Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly,
+and not for a lady to confront.”
+
+“They are coming up!”
+
+He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
+unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest,
+turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.
+
+His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.
+
+“Fraulein,” he said huskily, “you are very lovely. I carry always in my
+heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu.”
+
+He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down
+the staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap
+on the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have
+feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable
+like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as
+unobtrusively as he had entered it.
+
+The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
+washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered
+what was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief
+are great moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message,
+English, German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.
+
+“The Herr Georgiev has been arrested,” she wrote. An hour later the
+carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over
+the church roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life.
+Grim-visaged war had touched her and passed on.
+
+The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building
+followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned
+out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden
+hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor was found stored a quantity of
+ammunition.
+
+It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished,
+when the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the
+chattering sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way
+to her dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.
+
+She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully
+descended.
+
+“I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live.”
+
+The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her
+ears; the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from
+the workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition
+boxes on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.
+
+Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in,
+toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.
+
+“You!” she said.
+
+The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, “Yea, yea,” and
+“Nay, nay.”
+
+“Yes, Fraulein.”
+
+Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal, infinitely
+touching.
+
+“You will not say that you have found, have seen me?”
+
+“No, Fraulein.”
+
+It was in Harmony's mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to learn--of
+Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that belonged to the old
+life in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was no time. The sentry's
+impassive face became rigid; he looked through her, not at her. Harmony
+turned.
+
+The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was no
+further chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the boxes
+down the staircase.
+
+Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in the
+market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in the
+Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony's golden head as she bent over a bit
+of chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the whitewashed staircase
+her heavy cans of milk; on the carrier pigeon winging its way to the
+south; beating in through bars to the exalted face of Herr Georgiev;
+resting on Peter's drooping shoulders, on the neglected mice and the
+wooden soldier, on the closed eyes of a sick child--the worshiped sun,
+peering forth--the golden window of the East.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through
+the night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had
+been times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With
+the daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of
+hope, enough to make harder Peter's acceptance of the inevitable.
+
+The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened
+his eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter
+died many deaths that night.
+
+At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie,
+creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently
+asleep and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at
+her footstep and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He
+motioned her back.
+
+“But you must have a little sleep, Peter.”
+
+“No. I'll stay until--Go back to bed. It is very early.”
+
+Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now
+it was useless. At eight o'clock he let Marie take his place, then he
+bathed and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another
+night. For the child's release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast,
+but managed only a cup of coffee.
+
+Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was
+insistent--the boy's mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her.
+Peter might know in his heart that he had done the best thing for the
+child, but like Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse
+him. He had separated mother and child. Who was he to have decided the
+mother's unfitness, to have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the
+lives of others in his hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where;
+the boy dying without his mother. Whatever that mother might be, her
+place that day was with her boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He
+was humbled as well as stricken, poor Peter!
+
+In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the
+mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter,
+signed only “Mamma,” was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.
+
+“And for Heaven's sake be quick,” wrote Peter. “This is a matter of
+hours. I meant well, but I've done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no
+matter what she is or where you find her.” The Portier carried the note.
+When he came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and
+a lettuce leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and
+amuse the boy. He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. “He saw
+it not,” he reported sadly to his wife. “Be off to the church while
+I deliver this letter. And this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in
+remembrance.”
+
+At eleven o'clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair
+sofa.
+
+“He asks for you.”
+
+Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy's eyes were open and
+fixed on him.
+
+“Is it another day?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, boy; another morning.”
+
+“I am cold, Peter.”
+
+They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he
+could see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very
+humble, found himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To
+see this small soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a
+bit of light for the journey! Peter's religion had been one of life and
+living, not of creed.
+
+Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.
+
+“He knows, poor little one!” she whispered.
+
+And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of
+broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the
+cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from
+the boy.
+
+“One is sick, Jimmy boy,” he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and
+shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:--
+
+“If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?”
+
+“Yes, honey, I think so.”
+
+The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind
+too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed
+eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter
+bent over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.
+
+“What is it, dear?”
+
+“I'm afraid--it's going to die!”
+
+“Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?” asked Peter gently. “To go to
+heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer
+and the sun always shines?”
+
+No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed
+its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their
+dead mother.
+
+“Is there grass?”
+
+“Yes--soft green grass.”
+
+“Do--boys in heaven--go in their bare feet?” Ah, small mind and heart,
+so terrified and yet so curious!
+
+“Indeed, yes.” And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted
+such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint--a
+heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of
+dear departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees
+in fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with
+smiling eyes and death in his heart, a child's heaven of games and
+friendly Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.
+
+The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was
+increasingly an effort.
+
+“I should--like--to go there,” he whispered at last.
+
+He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk
+he roused again.
+
+“I would like--to see--the sentry,” he said with difficulty.
+
+And so again, and for the last time, Rosa's soldier from Salzburg with
+one lung.
+
+Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed
+muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears. Monia, upset over the
+morning's excitement, was irritable and unreasonable. The gold-tissue
+costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint. Below in the
+courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where
+the morning had seen such occurrences.
+
+At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of
+salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of
+playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour
+of the day. To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia
+quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the
+pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play
+such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her
+whole beautiful face and body glowing with the melody she made, the
+girls found the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she
+did not suspect it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the workroom.
+She was not of the people, they said--the daughter of a great American,
+of course, run away to escape a loveless marriage. This was borne out
+by the report of one of them who had glimpsed the silk petticoat. It
+was rumored also that she wore no chemise, but instead an infinitely
+coquettish series of lace and nainsook garments--of a fineness!
+
+Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not played
+since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to Peter as she
+had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little Georgiev as he went
+down the staircase. And finally with a choke in her throat to the little
+mother back home, so hopeful, so ignorant.
+
+In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of the day
+at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd and coming back
+quickly through the winter night. The staircase was always a peril, to
+be encountered and conquered night after night and even in the daytime
+not to be lightly regarded. On her way up this night she heard steps
+ahead, heavy, measured steps that climbed steadily without pauses. For
+an instant Harmony thought it sounded like Peter's step and she went
+dizzy.
+
+But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had stood
+that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels in, toes out,
+chest out, was the sentry.
+
+Harmony's first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the
+building. Then she saw that the sentry's impassive face wore lines of
+trouble. He saluted. “Please, Fraulein.”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I have not told the Herr Doktor.”
+
+“I thank you.”
+
+“But the child dies.”
+
+“Jimmy?”
+
+“He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps, but of
+moments.”
+
+Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. “You are sure? You
+are not telling me so that I will go back?”
+
+“He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours. My
+wife, Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and her cousin,
+the wife of the Portier, weeps over the stove. Please, Fraulein, come
+with me.”
+
+“When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?”
+
+“But now.”
+
+“And he still lives?”
+
+“Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you.”
+
+Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all that was
+personal and small and frightened, before the reality of death. She
+rose, as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis; ceased trembling,
+got her hat and coat and her shabby gloves and joined the sentry again.
+Another moment's delay--to secure the Le Grande's address from Monia.
+Then out into the night, Harmony to the Siebensternstrasse, the tall
+soldier to find the dancer at her hotel, or failing that, at the
+Ronacher Music-Hall.
+
+Harmony took a taxicab--nothing must be spared now--bribed the chauffeur
+to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across the garden, still
+tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper flight, and rang the
+bell.
+
+Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was
+nothing to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in hand,
+alone, drear, tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw Harmony and
+went white, holding to the back of his chair. Their eyes met, agony
+and hope in them, love and death, rapture and bitterness. In Harmony's,
+pleading, promise, something of doubt; in Peter's, only yearning, as of
+empty arms. Then Harmony dared to look at the bed and fell on her knees
+in a storm of grief beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her
+hair.
+
+Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the immense
+theater waiters scurried back and forward among the tables. Everywhere
+was the clatter of silver and steel on porcelain, the clink of glasses.
+Smoke was everywhere--pipes, cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between
+bites at the tables, using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a
+gold one shone here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners,
+spraying the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the
+stage sat the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph. They
+were drinking cheap native wines and were very happy.
+
+From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the people to
+her.
+
+“In the box--don't stare, Liebchen, he looks--is the princeling I have
+told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids.”
+
+“Last night! Were you here?” He coughed.
+
+“I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when she
+finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and tosses
+them to her.”
+
+“Shameless! Is she so beautiful?”
+
+“No. But you shall see. She comes.”
+
+Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the program;
+and because she sang in American, which is not exactly English and more
+difficult to understand, her songs were considered exceedingly risque.
+As a matter of fact they were merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to
+them that caught the Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentimental
+ditties and the artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another
+reason for her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen
+pickaninnies.
+
+In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the
+little chorus had made good.
+
+Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind
+her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet
+coats and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a pair sat on the
+boot.
+
+Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing against
+dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by cigarettes and
+absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled their American prototypes
+as the night resembles the day.
+
+She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
+rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve little
+darkies.
+
+She sang “Dixie,” of course, and the “Old Folks at Home”; then a ragtime
+medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and clogging with
+all their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a whirling, nimble
+dance. The little rhinestones on her stockings flashed; her opulent
+bosom quivered. The Dozent, eyes on the dancer, squeezed his companion's
+hand.
+
+“I love thee!” he whispered, rather flushed.
+
+And then she sang “Doan ye cry, mah honey.” Her voice, rather coarse but
+melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing and lilt of the
+lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling, preternaturally solemn,
+linked arms and swayed rhythmically, right, left, right, left. The
+glasses ceased clinking; sturdy citizens forgot their steak and beer
+for a moment and listened, knife and fork poised. Under the table the
+Dozent's hand pressed its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer
+on Le Grande, but on the woman across, his sweetheart, she who would
+be mother of his children. The words meant little to the audience; the
+rich, rolling Southern lullaby held them rapt:--
+
+     “Doan ye Cry, mah honey--
+     Doan ye weep no mo',
+     Mammy's gwine to hold her baby,
+     All de udder black trash sleepin' on the flo',”
+
+The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.
+
+She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against her
+breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The crowd
+applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung them. Glasses
+and dishes clinked again.
+
+The Dozent bent across the table.
+
+“Some day--” he said.
+
+The girl blushed.
+
+Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little troupe.
+A motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off, rounded them up
+like a flock of chickens.
+
+And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier of the
+old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room. For a moment
+gold dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted each other. Then the
+sentry touched his cap.
+
+“Madam,” he said, “the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and to-night
+he dies.”
+
+“What child?” Her arms were full of flowers.
+
+“The child from the hospital. Please to make haste.”
+
+Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with one hand
+in Harmony's and one between Peter's two big ones.
+
+Toward the last he called Peter “Daddy” and asked for a drink. His eyes,
+moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the grayfaced woman
+in a gold dress who stood staring down at him, rested a moment on the
+cage of mice, came to a stop in the doorway, where stood the sentry,
+white and weary, but refusing rest.
+
+It was Harmony who divined the child's unspoken wish.
+
+“The manual?” she whispered.
+
+The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across from
+the old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but no lack of
+vigor, went again through the Austrian manual of arms, and because he
+had no carbine he used Peter's old walking-stick.
+
+When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay still.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony he
+loved her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had about given
+out, and there was no way to get more save by earning it. The drain of
+Jimmy's illness, the inevitable expense of the small grave and the tiny
+stone Peter had insisted on buying, had made retreat his only course.
+True, Le Grande had wished to defray all expenses, but Peter was
+inexorable. No money earned as the dancer earned hers should purchase
+peaceful rest for the loved little body. And after seeing Peter's eyes
+the dancer had not insisted.
+
+A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference between
+Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart raised the money
+somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and eager, with the pin he had
+sent her to Semmering at her throat. She kissed Peter on the cheek in
+the station, rather to his embarrassment. From the lowered window, as
+the train pulled out, she waved a moist handkerchief.
+
+“I shall be very good,” she promised him. The last words he heard above
+the grinding of the train were her cheery: “To America!”
+
+Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food
+where he might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the
+delicatessen shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the
+house in the Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until
+Marie's small preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter
+was at the station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her
+address. She wrote:--
+
+“You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before
+and that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in
+the Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have
+been trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for
+me. You must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I
+am managing well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening
+lesson, and soon I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can
+see how things are looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to
+renew my music lessons. And then, Peter,--the career!
+
+“HARMONY.”
+
+Her address was beneath.
+
+Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with
+the letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer
+her nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps,
+surely, everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only
+once taken the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life
+itself to him. But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in
+everything else, had sapped his confidence.
+
+He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself
+confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined
+face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child's head
+against its breast.
+
+So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must
+let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to
+success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had
+proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care
+of herself in the old city. Only--to go away and leave her there!
+
+McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in the
+Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen
+during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony's every word, every
+gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard work began to tell on
+her, McLean's devotion would win its reward. McLean's devotion, with
+all that it meant, the lessons again, community of taste, their common
+youth! Peter felt old, very tired.
+
+Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his gray
+suit to the Portier's wife to be pressed, and getting out his surgical
+case, as he had once before in the Pension Schwarz, he sewed a button
+on his overcoat, using the curved needle and the catgut and working with
+surgeon's precision. Then, still working very carefully, he trimmed the
+edges of graying hair over his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best
+silk tie, now almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not
+coming, he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy's room to feed
+the mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with his face
+working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside table.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his defeat
+and approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them. Then he decided
+against this palpable appeal for sympathy, elected to go empty-handed
+and discover merely how comfortable she was or was not. When the time
+came he would slip out of her life, sending her a letter and leaving
+McLean on guard.
+
+Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase--where Harmony
+had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down to his
+death--climbed steadily, but without his usual elasticity. The place
+appalled him--its gloom, its dinginess, its somber quiet. In the
+daylight, with the pigeons on the sills and the morning sunlight
+printing the cross of the church steeple on the whitewashed wall, it was
+peaceful, cloisterlike, with landings that were crypts. But at night it
+was almost terrifying, that staircase.
+
+Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper landing,
+playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He waited outside
+before ringing, heard her begin something determinedly cheerful, falter,
+cease altogether. Peter rang.
+
+Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps--oh, certainly she had expected
+him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how she was getting
+on, how she was housed. She held out her hand and Peter took it. Still
+no words, only a half smile from her and no smile at all from Peter, but
+his heart in his eyes.
+
+“I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room.”
+
+“You knew I would come,” said Peter. “The reception room?”
+
+“Where customers wait.” She still carried her violin, and slipped back
+to her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its
+meagerness. He drew a long breath.
+
+Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen knitting a
+stocking. The reception room was warm from the day's fire, and in order.
+All the pins and scraps of the day had been swept up, and the portieres
+that made fitting-rooms of the corners were pushed back. Peter saw
+only a big room with empty corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were
+Harmony's.
+
+He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet settee. They
+were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first time. In the squalor
+of the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable intimacies of the Street of
+Seven Stars, they had been easy, unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was
+tongue-tied. Only one thing in him clamored for utterance, and that he
+sternly silenced.
+
+“I--I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?”
+
+“No. Of course, I understood.”
+
+“You were not angry?”
+
+“Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I needed
+you. Only, of course,--”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I'll not say that, I think.”
+
+“Please say it, Peter!”
+
+Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.
+
+“Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me, only--”
+
+“Only--I always need you!” Peter, Peter!
+
+“Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs a
+woman; but--”
+
+“Well, of course--but--I'm generally in trouble, Harry dear.”
+
+Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of his
+weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by stooping for a
+neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had stuck it in his lapel he
+had saved his mental forces from the rout of Harmony's eyes.
+
+His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most
+delectable look in the aforesaid eyes.
+
+“I didn't come to be silly,” he said to the table. “I hate people who
+whine, and I've got into a damnable habit of being sorry for myself!
+It's to laugh, isn't it, a great, hulking carcass like me, to be--”
+
+“Peter,” said Harmony softly, “aren't you going to look at me?”
+
+“I'm afraid.”
+
+“That's cowardice. And I've fixed my hair a new way. Do you like it?”
+
+“Splendid,” said Peter to the center table.
+
+“You didn't look!”
+
+The rout of Harmony's eyes was supplemented by the rout of Harmony's
+hair. Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony was half
+exasperated; she would have boxed Peter's ears with a tender hand had
+she dared.
+
+His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced her at
+last.
+
+“First of all,” he said, “I am going back to America, Harmony. I've
+got all I can get here, all I came for--” He stopped, seeing her face.
+“Well, of course, that's not true, I haven't. But I'm going back,
+anyhow. You needn't look so stricken: I haven't lost my chance. I'll
+come back sometime again and finish, when I've earned enough to do it.”
+
+“You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money on
+others, and now you are going back just where you were, and--you are
+leaving me here alone!”
+
+“You are alone, anyhow,” said Peter, “making your own way and getting
+along. And McLean will be here.”
+
+“Are you turning me over to him?”
+
+No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.
+
+“Peter!”
+
+“Yes, dear?”
+
+“Do you remember the night in Anna's room at the Schwartz when you
+proposed to me?”
+
+No reply. Peter found another pin.
+
+“And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?”
+
+Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young figure,
+her luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.
+
+“Peter, I want you to--to ask me again.”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Now, listen to me, Harmony. You're sorry for me, that's all; I don't
+want to be pitied. You stay here and work. You'll do big things. I had a
+talk with the master while I was searching for you, and he says you
+can do anything. But he looked at me--and a sight I was with worry and
+fright--and he warned me off, Harmony. He says you must not marry.”
+
+“Old pig!” said Harmony. “I will marry if I please.”
+
+Nevertheless Peter's refusal and the master's speech had told somewhat.
+She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood close, looking
+down at her.
+
+“I've said a lot I didn't mean to,” he said. “There's only one thing I
+haven't said, I oughtn't to say it, dear. I'm not going to marry you--I
+won't have such a thing on my conscience. But it doesn't hurt a woman
+to know that a man loves her. I love you, dear. You're my heaven and my
+earth--even my God, I'm afraid. But I will not marry you.”
+
+“Not even if I ask you to?”
+
+“Not even then, dear. To share my struggle--”
+
+“I see,” slowly. “It is to be a struggle?”
+
+“A hard fight, Harmony. I'm a pauper practically.”
+
+“And what am I?”
+
+“Two poverties don't make a wealth, even of happiness,” said Peter
+steadily. “In the time to come, when you would think of what you might
+have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me, dear.”
+
+“People have married, women have married and carried on their work, too,
+Peter.”
+
+“Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of man,
+Harry. I'm jealous--jealous of every one about you. It would have to be
+the music or me.”
+
+“And you make the choice!” said Harmony proudly. “Very well, Peter, I
+shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious sort of love.”
+
+“I wonder,” Peter cried, “if you realize what love it is that loves you
+enough to give you up.”
+
+“You have not asked me if I care, Peter.”
+
+Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very
+beautiful.
+
+“I'm afraid to ask,” said Peter, and picking up his hat he made for the
+door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.
+
+“My sweetest heart!” he cried, and took her in his hungry arms. But even
+then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her slender body held
+to him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to her soft throat, Peter put
+her from him as a starving man might put away food.
+
+He held her off and looked at her.
+
+“I'm a fool and a weakling,” he said gravely. “I love you so much that I
+would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my girl! As long as I
+live I shall carry your image in my heart.”
+
+Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death that
+waited down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her again, put
+away her detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went to the door.
+
+“Good-bye, Harmony,” he said steadily. “Always in my heart!”
+
+Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America, with
+the recording angel opening a new page in life's ledger for her and
+a red-ink line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his daddy wandering
+through the heaven of friendly adventure and green fields, hand in hand;
+with the carrier resting after its labors in the pigeon house by the
+rose-fields of Sofia; with the sentry casting martial shadows through
+the barred windows of the hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to
+die, dividing his heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young
+girl.
+
+Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining into
+the salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter's open trunk and shabby
+wardrobe spread over chairs. An end of trunks and departure, as was the
+beginning.
+
+Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God's acre, whence little Jimmy had
+started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on the frost-covered
+grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle of the Donau. Harmony had
+taken her problem there, in the early hour before Monia would summon her
+to labor--took her problem and found her answer.
+
+The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too warmly
+clad, walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper against the
+cold. Already the air carried a hint of spring; there was a feeling of
+resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt alive under-foot.
+
+Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child had
+repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it, with some
+vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the little verse:--
+
+“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes:
+And in the hereafter, angels may Roll the stone from its grave away.”
+
+When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.
+
+There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great bunch
+of roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence they came. One
+of the pickaninnies had carried the box and stood impassively by, gazing
+at Harmony.
+
+Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered it, quite
+eclipsed Harmony's.
+
+“I come here every morning,” she said simply.
+
+She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the city.
+Her quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked once into the
+woman's eyes. After that she knew. It was on the drive back, with the
+little darky on the box beside the driver, that Harmony got her answer.
+
+Le Grande put a hand over Harmony's.
+
+“I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him.”
+
+“We loved him.”
+
+“And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right--I was not a fit person
+to--to have him.”
+
+“It was not that--not only that--”
+
+“Did he ever ask for me? But of course not.”
+
+“No, he had no remembrance.”
+
+Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.
+
+“I loved him very much when he came,” said Le Grande, “although I did
+not want him. I had been told I could have a career on the stage. Ah,
+my dear, I chose the career--and look at me! What have I? A grave in
+the cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by a man I loathe! If I
+could live it over again!”
+
+The answer was very close now:--
+
+“Would you stay at home?”
+
+“Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the boy
+always. There is only one thing worth while--the love of a good man. I
+have lived, lived hard. And I know.”
+
+“But supposing that one has real ability--I mean some achievement
+already, and a promise--”
+
+Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.
+
+“I see. You are a musician, I believe?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And--it is Dr. Byrne?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Le Grande bent forward earnestly.
+
+“My child,” she said, “if one man in all the world looked at me as your
+doctor looks at you, I--I would be a better woman.”
+
+“And my music?”
+
+“Play for your children, as you played for my little boy.”
+
+Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting clean
+collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like negligible garments
+with great care and putting in his dresscoat in a roll. His pipes took
+time, and the wooden sentry he packed with great care and a bit of
+healthy emotion. Once or twice he came across trifles of Harmony's, and
+he put them carefully aside--the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief,
+a bow she had worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before
+and that reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get away
+if he is to keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon bow can
+bring that look of suffering into his eyes.
+
+The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot, any foot
+at all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.
+
+“Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen,” he sang at the top of his
+voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the air. The
+antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in his bedroom.
+When the wildgame seller came over for coffee there would be a
+discussion probably. But were not the antlers of all deer similar?
+
+The Portier's wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her hand.
+
+“A cab,” she announced, “with a devil's imp on the box. Perhaps it is
+that American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!”
+
+It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache. Harmony
+was at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week before or the
+undecided and troubled girl of before that. A radiant Harmony, this, who
+stood in the doorway, who wished them good-morning, and ran up the old
+staircase with glowing eyes and a heart that leaped and throbbed. A
+woman now, this Harmony, one who had looked on life and learned; one
+who had chosen her fate and was running to meet it; one who feared only
+death, not life or anything that life could offer.
+
+The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up--not dressed. What did
+that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?
+
+Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney's Point, had come across a bit
+of paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his open trunk,
+staring blindly at it:--
+
+“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+“H. W.”
+
+Quite the end now, with Harmony running across the room and dropping
+down on her knees among a riot of garments--down on her knees, with one
+arm round Peter's neck, drawing his tired head lower until she could
+kiss him.
+
+“Oh, Peter, Peter, dear!” she cried. “I'll love you all my life if only
+you'll love me, and never, never let me go!”
+
+Peter was dazed at first. He put his arms about her rather unsteadily,
+because he had given her up and had expected to go through the rest of
+life empty of arm and heart. And when one has one's arms set, as one may
+say, for loneliness and relinquishment it is rather difficult--Ah, but
+Peter got the way of it swiftly.
+
+“Always,” he said incoherently; “forever the two of us. Whatever comes,
+Harmony?”
+
+“Whatever comes.”
+
+“And you'll not be sorry?”
+
+“Not if you love me.”
+
+Peter kissed her on the eyes very solemnly.
+
+“God helping me, I'll be good to you always. And I'll always love you.”
+
+He tried to hold her away from him for a moment after that, to tell her
+what she was doing, what she was giving up. She would not be reasoned
+with.
+
+“I love you,” was her answer to every line. And it was no divided
+allegiance she promised him. “Career? I shall have a career. Yours!”
+
+“And your music?”
+
+She colored, held him closer.
+
+“Some day,” she whispered, “I shall tell you about that.”
+
+Late winter morning in Vienna, with the school-children hurrying home,
+the Alserstrasse alive with humanity--soldiers and chimney-sweeps,
+housewives and beggars. Before the hospital the crowd lines up along the
+curb; the head waiter from the coffee-house across comes to the doorway
+and looks out. The sentry in front of the hospital ceases pacing and
+stands at attention.
+
+In the street a small procession comes at the double quick--a handful of
+troopers, a black van with tiny, high-barred windows, more troopers.
+
+Inside the van a Bulgarian spy going out to death--a swarthy little man
+with black eyes and short, thick hands, going out like a gentleman and a
+soldier to meet the God of patriots and lovers.
+
+The sentry, who was only a soldier from Salzburg with one lung, was also
+a gentleman and a patriot. He uncovered his head.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1214 ***
diff --git a/1214-h/1214-h.htm b/1214-h/1214-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fed9837
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1214-h/1214-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,11808 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1214 ***</div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER XXVII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been a
+      garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game
+      preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the
+      building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something royal in
+      the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the great
+      glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling was
+      mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great
+      empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to
+      anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
+      related not a few herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside in
+      the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the heavy
+      barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named Scatchett
+      and dubbed &ldquo;Scatch&rdquo;&mdash;the gate slammed to and fro monotonously, giving
+      now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched itself, a
+      hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of
+      enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto, it
+      had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light if
+      not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a
+      gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of
+      the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a
+      crumpled napkin or two,&mdash;there were never enough to go round,&mdash;and
+      on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned for the things
+      of the flesh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with the
+      slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft under
+      the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old floor. At
+      the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled near the tile
+      stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no impatience,
+      however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put them together
+      carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of the grand piano,
+      anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from the stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was very bare&mdash;a long mirror between two of the windows,
+      half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano.
+      There were no rugs&mdash;the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners
+      and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
+      stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
+      under her fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
+      armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance
+      of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could
+      reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that the
+      girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed the
+      fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let the
+      initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had been
+      made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what; and it
+      revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of trunks. The
+      girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and looked at the
+      trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A door slammed
+      down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into one of those
+      receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she rubbed a
+      chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells, a
+      tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite &ldquo;Arlesienne&rdquo; will
+      serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
+      &ldquo;Siegfried&rdquo; will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more than
+      once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of early
+      rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with stiffened
+      fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a stove, and
+      sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once pink
+      butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls, and
+      honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in the
+      salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves and
+      holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down the
+      stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped
+      to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might
+      practice peacefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
+      from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
+      listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he
+      shook his fist up the stone staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gott im Himmel!&rdquo; he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of his
+      mustache bandage, &ldquo;what a people, these Americans! So much noise and no
+      music!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And mad!&rdquo; grumbled his wife. &ldquo;All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
+      night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going back
+      to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch was
+      returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her head
+      much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters had
+      gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds were
+      very low with all of them. The &ldquo;Bitte zum speisen&rdquo; of the little German
+      maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of beef and
+      carrots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
+      never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days&mdash;a
+      fruitcake from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or
+      twice on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth
+      it. Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness,
+      and a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh,
+      yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and the
+      faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all had
+      always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad&mdash;the
+      expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the
+      contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in one's
+      mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after nine months
+      of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or&mdash;and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
+      soul&mdash;to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
+      undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony stood
+      on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was calling down
+      the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scatch,&rdquo; she was shouting briskly, &ldquo;where is my hairbrush?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't you got a
+      comb?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the teeth are
+      out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look under the bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is,&rdquo; she called joyously. &ldquo;And here are Harmony's bedroom
+      slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!&rdquo; The girl got down off the
+      chair and went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks, dear,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm coming in a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa, and
+      looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the window
+      the air would brighten them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano's room.
+      She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her shabby
+      wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were no
+      footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to the Big
+      Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and held out her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Under my bed! Ten kronen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and ponderously
+      getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the dusty floor
+      beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on which she
+      pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the candle flame
+      and sat solemnly puffing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first for a week,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there
+      may be another relic of my prosperous days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a
+      government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen
+      piece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the other?&rdquo; she asked in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In my powder-box.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every little bit,&rdquo; she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, &ldquo;added to
+      what she's got, makes just a little bit more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it, it's
+      good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without losing
+      it now. I'll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New York&mdash;I
+      haven't even a dollar for tips.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;New York!&rdquo; said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. &ldquo;If Henry meets
+      me I know he will&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut!&rdquo; The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. &ldquo;You and
+      your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young mind
+      that money isn't the only thing Harmony is going to need? She's going to
+      be alone&mdash;and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not like
+      us. You have your Henry. I'm a beefy person who has a stomach, and I'm
+      thankful for it. But she is different&mdash;she's got the thing that you
+      are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to fight
+      in a church choir instead of grand opera.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Temperament?&rdquo; she asked. It had always been accepted in the little colony
+      that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser firmament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Big Soprano sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you like,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to
+      have souls, Scatchy, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was coming down
+      the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought, under her pillow,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;She'll find it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame of
+      a candle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having
+      seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back
+      alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were gone
+      now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little
+      Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry's arms about her,
+      had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears of
+      paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets were
+      still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense
+      of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming
+      gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place at
+      best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door, eyes
+      and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure had
+      stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment the
+      gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his
+      mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented when he
+      smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early morning
+      practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he cherished a
+      hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was for her he
+      wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day&mdash;hopefully! One must be
+      ready!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the
+      five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece of
+      his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a
+      gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bitte, Fraulein!&rdquo; he said through the bandage. &ldquo;It is for me a pleasure
+      to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over his
+      hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to Harmony that
+      lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could not but she
+      held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in his best
+      manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the stone
+      staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her with
+      his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting to
+      Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out into
+      the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the shadows,
+      and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when&mdash;having picked up her violin in a very passion of
+      loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds
+      echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms&mdash;it was when she
+      was ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl
+      from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having
+      adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the
+      gifted:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am
+      honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if
+      you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this
+      pleasure. Harry, you have it&mdash;the real thing, you know, whatever it
+      is&mdash;and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To
+      go now, just when lessons would mean everything&mdash;well, you must not
+      think of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us,
+      or at least&mdash;well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by
+      being careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but it may
+      help. Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and it may be yours
+      anyhow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things about our
+      leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You are so beautiful,
+      Harry,&mdash;although you never let us tell you so. And Sadie says you
+      have a soul and I haven't, and that souls are deadly things to have. I
+      feel to-night that in urging you to stay I am taking the burden of your
+      soul on me! Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you
+      call a policeman. And be sure you get into a respectable pension. There
+      are queer ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from home&mdash;you
+      said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?&mdash;and will keep this
+      as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go wrong&mdash;. But
+      perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any case, of course it's a loan, and
+      you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours by sending it back
+      when you get to work to make your fortune. And if you are doubtful at all,
+      just remember that hopeful little mother of yours who sent you over to get
+      what she had never been able to have for herself, and who planned this for
+      you from the time you were a kiddy and she named you Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SCATCH.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson
+      feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in the
+      draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony fought
+      her battle. And a battle it was. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had not known
+      everything. There had been no insurance on her father's life; the little
+      mother was penniless. A married sister would care for her, but what then?
+      Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to take her home, and
+      she had&mdash;the hoard under the pillow. To go back and teach the violin;
+      or to stay and finish under the master, be presented, as he had promised
+      her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the prestige at home that
+      that would mean, and its resulting possibility of fame and fortune&mdash;which?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she could teach
+      English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some of the stores
+      advertised &ldquo;English Spoken.&rdquo; That would be something to fall back on, a
+      clerkship during the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the
+      Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and
+      comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with
+      most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which
+      reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather
+      frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet under
+      her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out into the
+      cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall and listened.
+      She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the barcarolle from the
+      &ldquo;Tales&rdquo; of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in his night attire, his
+      chest open to the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor
+      above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly.
+      His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand. She eyed
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So! It is the American Fraulein now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music.&rdquo; He
+      fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one
+      eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She leaves to-day,&rdquo; she announced, ignoring the knot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? She is alone. Rosa says&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She leaves to-day!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth compactness.
+      The Portier jerked at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I last
+      night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair after her!
+      A man in the gateway!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage, which had
+      slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will stay if she so desire,&rdquo; he muttered furiously, and, raising the
+      knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and sweetly
+      up-curled, stood revealed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will stay!&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;And when you see men at the gate, let me
+      know. She is an angel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from
+      telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one's heart.
+      Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day&mdash;Himmel, the girl
+      must go!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and expensive;
+      Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere a tiny room with
+      board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly to practice with
+      stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not annoy people, that
+      was important.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa
+      wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it
+      was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city&mdash;young
+      girls of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she
+      could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went down to
+      interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the owner for
+      the old house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He looked
+      past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that the lease was up
+      and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight she was not so like the
+      angel, and after all she could only play the violin. The angel had a
+      voice, such a voice! And besides, there was an eye at the crack of the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a heavy heart
+      that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper quarters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
+      cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the gutters were
+      frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in the mountains the day
+      before and hanging from a hook before a wild-game shop, was frozen quite
+      stiff. It was a pretty creature. The girl turned her eyes away. A young
+      man, buying cheese and tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's an American girl, isn't it?&rdquo; he asked in American-German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him, and Rosa
+      talked. When the American left the shop he knew everything of Harmony that
+      Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called her &ldquo;The Beautiful One.&rdquo; Also he
+      was short one krone four beliers in his change, which is readily done when
+      a customer is plainly thinking of a &ldquo;beautiful one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a stove and no
+      objection to practicing. There were plenty&mdash;but the rates! The willow
+      plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of making the plainest garments
+      appear costly. Landladies looked at the plume and the suit and heard the
+      soft swish of silk beneath, which marks only self-respect in the American
+      woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their regular terms
+      until poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then at last toward
+      evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the corner of the
+      Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing, and the
+      landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for earache,
+      Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the center,
+      and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear higher than the
+      other and twisted one's nose. But there was an odor of stewing cabbage in
+      the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many previous stewed cabbages,
+      and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco. Harmony had had no lunch; she
+      turned rather faint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity of
+      the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or twice.
+      At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her eyes
+      closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a cheese
+      and some tinned fish under his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not ill, are you?&rdquo; he asked in English, and then remembering. &ldquo;Bist du
+      krank?&rdquo; He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity
+      of the &ldquo;du.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only tired,&rdquo; she said in English. &ldquo;And the odor of cabbage&mdash;&ldquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand. He
+      whistled softly. He had recognized her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cabbage, of course!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The pension upstairs is full of it. I live
+      there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served up with pork.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So bad,&rdquo; he observed, &ldquo;that I keep body and soul together by buying
+      strong and odorous food at the delicatessens&mdash;odorous, because only
+      rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only
+      thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese
+      has retired defeated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't like cheese.&rdquo; In sheer relief from the loneliness of the day
+      her spirits were rising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I
+      say&mdash;&rdquo; He hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you&mdash;don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It sounds attractive,&rdquo;&mdash;uncertainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see this
+      brisk young American&mdash;young, she knew by his voice, tall by his
+      silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could not see his
+      face, but she liked his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean&mdash;with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
+      legitimate friends in need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure it is not proper, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for professional
+      services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced to-night by the
+      landlady? Come now&mdash;to the coffee-house and the Paris edition of the
+      'Herald'!&rdquo; But the next moment he paused and ran his hand over his chin.
+      &ldquo;I'm pretty disreputable,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;I have been in a clinic all day,
+      and, hang it all, I'm not shaved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What difference does that make?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear young lady,&rdquo; he explained gravely, picking up the cheese and the
+      tinned fish, &ldquo;it makes a difference in me that I wish you to realize
+      before you see me in a strong light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rapped at the Portier's door, with the intention of leaving his parcels
+      there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his arm. A moment later
+      Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a bit excited, and lovely with
+      the color the adventure brought into her face. Her companion walked beside
+      her, tall, slightly stooped. She essayed a fugitive little side-glance up
+      at him, and meeting his eyes hastily averted hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the girl's mind
+      little Scatchett's letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you, call a
+      policeman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were gathered
+      miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly men&mdash;uniformed
+      officers, who made of the neighborhood coffee-house a sort of club, where
+      under their breath they criticized the Government and retailed small
+      regimental gossip; professors from the university, still wearing under the
+      beards of middle life the fine horizontal scars of student days; elderly
+      doctors from the general hospital across the street; even a Hofrath or
+      two, drinking beer and reading the &ldquo;Fliegende Blaetter&rdquo; and
+      &ldquo;Simplicissimus&rdquo;; and in an alcove round a billiard table a group of noisy
+      Korps students. Over all a permeating odor of coffee, strong black coffee,
+      made with a fig or two to give it color. It rose even above the blue
+      tobacco haze and dominated the atmosphere with its spicy and stimulating
+      richness. A bustle of waiters, a hum of conversation, the rattle of
+      newspapers and the click of billiard balls&mdash;this was the
+      coffee-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony had been
+      a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American integrity, in spite of
+      the salon of Maria Theresa and three expensive lessons a week in German.
+      Harmony knew the art galleries and the churches, which were free, and the
+      opera, thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone of Austrian
+      life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and disappeared
+      for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of the &ldquo;Herald.&rdquo; The
+      girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the bright electric lights, he
+      was not handsome, hardly good-looking. His mouth was wide, his nose
+      irregular, his hair a nondescript brown,&mdash;but the mouth had humor,
+      the nose character, and, thank Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that
+      Harmony saw all this at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables,
+      with a nod here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect&mdash;a
+      tall man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall men
+      are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the points
+      of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak to him. The
+      shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly the revelation was an
+      easement to the girl's nervousness. This smiling and unpressed individual,
+      blithely waving aloft the Paris edition of the &ldquo;Herald&rdquo; and equally
+      blithely ignoring the maledictions of the student from whom he had taken
+      it&mdash;even Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or threatened
+      him with the police.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to interfere
+      with her outlook over the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Warmer?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They know me
+      here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest cakes for me.
+      Don't let me bother you; go on and read. See which of the smart set is
+      getting a divorce&mdash;or is it always the same one? And who's President
+      back home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take back to
+      America with me&mdash;one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local
+      color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's wife to sit in the
+      cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll grow wealthy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what about the medical practice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous
+      promise of his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, it will work out perfectly,&rdquo; he said whimsically. &ldquo;The great
+      American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the feeble
+      American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office across
+      the street!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation
+      until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her
+      with comfortable satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nod your head but don't speak,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Remember, I am prescribing, and
+      there's to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or shall I
+      not open the cheese?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something
+      inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional
+      swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the
+      paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded
+      room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on
+      Harmony's lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes
+      that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to shift
+      his gaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the
+      unknown protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The function of a coffee-house,&rdquo; he explained gravely, &ldquo;is twofold.
+      Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I converse very badly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that well.
+      Shall I commence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why choke over
+      conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It was warm there, with
+      the heater at her back; better than the little room with the sagging bed
+      and the doors covered with wall paper. Her feet had stopped aching, too,
+      She could have sat there for hours. And&mdash;why evade it?&mdash;she was
+      interested. This whimsical and respectful young man with his absurd talk
+      and his shabby clothes had roused her curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please,&rdquo; she assented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, first of all, my name. I'm getting that over early, because it
+      isn't much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don't shudder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly I'm not shuddering.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a German
+      uncle of my mother's. Augustus! It's rather a mess. What shall I put on my
+      professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus Byrne nobody's fooled. They
+      know my wretched first name is Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or Patrick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather like Patrick&mdash;if I thought it might pass as Patrick!
+      Patrick has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that's not bad. But
+      Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; Harmony confessed half shyly, &ldquo;I like Peter as a name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as Peter Byrne.
+      The rest doesn't amount to much, but I want you to know it, since you have
+      been good enough to accept me on faith. I'm here alone, from a little town
+      in eastern Ohio; worked my way through a coeducational college in the West
+      and escaped unmarried; did two years in a drygoods store until, by saving
+      and working in my vacations, I got through medical college and tried
+      general practice. Didn't like it&mdash;always wanted to do surgery. A
+      little legacy from the German uncle, trying to atone for the 'Augustus,'
+      gave me enough money to come here. I've got a chance with the Days&mdash;surgeons,
+      you know&mdash;when I go back, if I can hang on long enough. That's all.
+      Here's a traveler's check with my name on it, to vouch for the truth of
+      this thrilling narrative. Gaze on it with awe; there are only a few of
+      them left!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as the strings
+      of her own violin, and under the even lightness of his tone she felt many
+      things that met a response in her&mdash;loneliness and struggle, and the
+      ever-present anxiety about money, grim determination, hope and fear, and
+      even occasional despair. He was still young, but there were lines in his
+      face and a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less frank, she
+      would have known soon enough&mdash;the dingy little pension, the shabby
+      clothes&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you for telling me,&rdquo; she said simply. &ldquo;I think I understand very
+      well because&mdash;it's music with me: violin. And my friends have gone,
+      so I am alone, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd without
+      seeing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's curious, isn't it?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Here we are, you and I, meeting in the
+      center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief, both working our heads off
+      for an idea that may never pan out! Why aren't you at home to-night,
+      eating a civilized beefsteak and running upstairs to get ready for a nice
+      young man to bring you a box of chocolates? Why am I not measuring out
+      calico in Shipley &amp; West's? Instead, we are going to Frau Schwarz', to
+      listen to cold ham and scorched compote eaten in six different languages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She was drawing
+      on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then, seeing Byrne,
+      he waved a greeting to him. Byrne's eyes, from being introspective, became
+      watchful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with black hair
+      and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He was not alone. A
+      slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic, rose when he did and threw
+      away the end of a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do we go so soon?&rdquo; she demanded fretfully in German. &ldquo;It is early
+      still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and eminently
+      satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke the other's
+      language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because, my beloved,&rdquo; he said lightly, &ldquo;you are smoking a great many
+      poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to speak to Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is that with Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a woman at
+      last!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with a slow
+      and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed him, and paused
+      to apologize, to the officer's delight and her escort's irritation. And
+      Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line of annoyance between his brows. The
+      girl was ahead; that complicated things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily, with a word
+      of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done. He had taken the
+      little Austrian's arm and led her by the table while he was still greeting
+      her. He held her in conversation in his absurd German until they had
+      reached the swinging doors, while her companion followed helplessly. And
+      he bowed her out, protesting his undying admiration for her eyes, while
+      the florid youth alternately raged behind him and stared back at Harmony,
+      interested and unconscious behind her table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned, unsmiling, to
+      the other man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That won't do, you know, Stewart,&rdquo; he said, grave but not unfriendly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Kid wouldn't bite her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll not argue about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not,&rdquo; he agreed cheerfully. &ldquo;That is up to you, of course. I
+      didn't know. We're looking for you to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne, but the
+      situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll be round,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have a lecture and I may be late, but I'll
+      come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Kid&rdquo; was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air,
+      angrily flushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You saw!&rdquo; she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand
+      through her arm. &ldquo;He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before I
+      knew you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before you knew me, little one,&rdquo; he said cheerfully, &ldquo;you were exactly
+      what you are now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused on the curb and raised her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So! And what is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beautiful as the stars, only&mdash;not so remote.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The
+      &ldquo;beautiful&rdquo; calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her
+      suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remote? What is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking of Worthington.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of soldiers
+      trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement and dodged
+      verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He drew his chin
+      into the up-turned collar of his overcoat and waited, an absurdly patient
+      figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided into a rain of tears.
+      Then he took the girl's elbow again and led her, childishly weeping, into
+      a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and eyes of the Alserstrasse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was
+      closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or of
+      his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather puzzled
+      at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation. He had
+      suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller's
+      narrative of Rosa's account of the disrupted colony across in the old
+      lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the dark
+      entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright light of the
+      coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the emotional
+      coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God save the
+      mark!&mdash;her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted it:
+      his responsibility, if you please.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly well&mdash;enough to
+      love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and
+      passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them,
+      or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament; the
+      all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher than
+      others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt Theater,
+      where he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had known in
+      Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking her own
+      meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater she had worn
+      a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its years of
+      coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's new resolution that
+      night: this poverty adopting poverty, this youth adopting youth, with the
+      altruistic purpose of saving it from itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story or knew
+      her name, Rosa having called her &ldquo;The Beautiful One&rdquo; in her narrative, and
+      the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Back to &ldquo;The Beautiful One&rdquo; went Peter Byrne, and, true to his new part of
+      protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and tried to look much older
+      than he really was, and responsible. The result was a grimness that
+      alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten proprieties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I must go,&rdquo; she said hurriedly, after a glance at his
+      determinedly altruistic profile. &ldquo;I must finish packing my things. The
+      Portier has promised&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go! Why, you haven't even told me your name!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frau Schwarz will present you to-night,&rdquo; primly and rising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne rose, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely yard
+      alone after dark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yard! How do you know that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set on the
+      heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of dissolution. It
+      took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally furnished an inspiration. He
+      indicated it airily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Saw you this morning coming out&mdash;delicatessen shop across the
+      street,&rdquo; he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty which the
+      girl's eyes seemed somehow to compel: &ldquo;That's true, but it's not all the
+      truth. I was on the bus last night, and when you got off alone I&mdash;I
+      saw you were an American, and that's not a good neighborhood. I took the
+      liberty of following you to your gate!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and said so. And
+      in her gratitude she made no objection to his suggestion that he see her
+      safely to the old lodge and help her carry her hand-luggage and her violin
+      to the pension. He paid the trifling score, and followed by many eyes in
+      the room they went out into the crisp night together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of scrubbing
+      showed that the Portier's wife was preparing for the inspection of
+      possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the stairs by the light of a
+      candle, and the steam of the hot water on the cold marble invested her
+      like an aura. She stood aside to let them pass, and then went cumbrously
+      down the stairs to where, a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other, the
+      Portier was frying chops for the evening meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I said?&rdquo; she demanded from the doorway. &ldquo;Your angel is here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you refuse,
+      because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is again here, and with
+      a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the way of the young and beautiful&mdash;there is always a man,&rdquo;
+       said the Portier, turning a chop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away,
+      exasperated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate,&rdquo; she threw back
+      over her shoulder. &ldquo;I knew it from the first; but you, great booby, can
+      see nothing but red lips. Bah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and freezing
+      cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter Byrne sat and
+      waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the Street of Seven Stars,
+      the arc lights swung in the wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz, much crimped
+      and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head of the long table.
+      There were few, almost no Americans, the Americans flocking to good food
+      at reckless prices in more fashionable pensions; to the Frau
+      Gallitzenstein's, for instance, in the Kochgasse, where there was to be
+      had real beefsteak, where turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and
+      Christmas, and where, were one so minded, one might revel in whipped
+      cream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the center of
+      the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with wire stems and green
+      paper leaves, and over the side-table, with its luxury of compote in tall
+      glass dishes and its wealth of small hard cakes, there hung a framed motto
+      which said, &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen,&rdquo; &ldquo;No Smoking,&rdquo;&mdash;and which looked
+      suspiciously as if it had once adorned a compartment of a railroad train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a careful
+      toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But he had gone
+      further: He had discovered, for the first time in the three months of its
+      defection, a button missing from his coat, and had set about to replace
+      it. He had cut a button from another coat, by the easy method of
+      amputating it with a surgical bistoury, and had sewed it in its new
+      position with a curved surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized
+      catgut. The operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with the
+      aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he tied the
+      ends in a surgeon's knot underneath and stood back to consider the result.
+      It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous. After a moment or two of troubled
+      thought he blacked the white catgut with a dot of ink and went on his way
+      rejoicing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the course he had
+      laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive line of thought as he
+      dressed. When he was not smoking he was whistling, and when he was doing
+      neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers, he was
+      swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The materials for
+      a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an obelisk in a
+      cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive, and hardly
+      necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open&mdash;one window, to
+      be exact, the room being very small&mdash;and spends most of the day in a
+      warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except
+      subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step by step,
+      the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon, weighing,
+      considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached as he brushed back
+      his hair and put away his sewing implements, was somewhat to the effect
+      that he could have done a better piece of work with his eyes shut and his
+      hands tied behind his back; and that if it were not for the wealth of
+      material to work on he'd pack up and go home. Which brought him back to
+      Harmony and his new responsibility. He took off the necktie he had
+      absently put on and hunted out a better one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was late at supper&mdash;an offense that brought a scowl from the head
+      of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile. Harmony was
+      already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish
+      student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of
+      language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to be
+      again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly, aware
+      of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did not
+      understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and failing
+      that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the day. Her
+      bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and rather aloof. She ate
+      almost nothing, and left the table before the others had finished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing eyes!
+      What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with dessert! What
+      heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted eyes, looking away
+      from appealing ones; lips that tremble with wretchedness nibbling daintily
+      at a morsel; smiles that sear; foolish bits of talk that mean nothing
+      except to one, and to that one everything! Harmony, freezing at Peter's
+      formal bow and gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the meal, or no
+      nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering the little
+      Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope of a glance. And
+      over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen&rdquo; sign, and an
+      acrimonious discussion on eugenics between an American woman doctor named
+      Gates and a German matron who had had fifteen children, and who reduced
+      every general statement to a personal insult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed, and she
+      was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one. Defiantly, too, had he
+      only known it, her small chin up and her color high again; playing the
+      &ldquo;Humoresque,&rdquo; of all things, in the hope, of course, that he would hear it
+      and guess from her choice the wild merriment of her mood. Peter rapped
+      once or twice, but obtained no answer, save that the &ldquo;Humoresque&rdquo; rose a
+      bit higher; and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he was forced
+      to light a cigarette to cover his pausing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman of forty
+      or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a masculine disregard of
+      clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let him help her into her ulster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;New girl, eh?&rdquo; she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door. &ldquo;Very gay,
+      isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that! Honestly, Peter, what
+      are we going to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better food, but
+      not for our terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put it on
+      with a single jerk down over her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, darn money, anyhow!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Come and walk to the corner with me.
+      I have a lecture.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his room. There,
+      on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he wrote&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you ill? Or have I done anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P. B.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the little
+      Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said nothing, nor did Peter,
+      who rose and dusted his knees. The little Bulgarian spoke no English and
+      little German. Between them was the wall of language. But higher than this
+      barrier was the understanding of their common sex. He held out his hand,
+      still smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took it. Then he followed
+      the woman doctor down the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be absurd.
+      She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts an
+      unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he had
+      offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his interest.
+      But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and intelligent
+      notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his enjoyment of the
+      Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed down its involved
+      German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not approve of
+      Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of
+      fineness in the man himself&mdash;an intangible thing that seems to be a
+      matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of
+      the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked to
+      Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise
+      combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that, and the recollection that
+      it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics, no
+      lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down and
+      that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was
+      whistling as he walked along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped under
+      a street light to consult his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almost ten!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie I
+      was going to your pension. She detests Stewart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make a good
+      woman understand that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God for that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the
+      &ldquo;Humoresque.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was to
+      be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights were
+      still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs and,
+      for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced as out
+      of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Out of order'!&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;Out of order since last spring, judging by
+      that card. Vorwarts!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer played
+      golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a
+      driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to forswear the
+      more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular development that
+      his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails, without an ounce of fat,
+      and he climbed the long steep flights with an elasticity that left even
+      Boyer a step or so behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat
+      replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with
+      smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the sound
+      of beer mugs on wood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men bowed
+      ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and bowing from
+      the waist. Byrne sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do I smell, Marie?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;Surely not sausages!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old
+      friend. It was always sausages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sausages, of a truth&mdash;fat ones.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But surely not with mustard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach, ja&mdash;englisch mustard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on
+      Byrne's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was very angry with you to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's unconventional
+      menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of addressing Marie in English,
+      while she replied in her own tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and you&mdash;She
+      is rich, so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know. I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And good?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking up
+      at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard.
+      Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She had
+      put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones were
+      small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was sad to-night,&rdquo; she said plaintively. &ldquo;I wished to jump out the
+      window.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I made you feel like that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not you&mdash;the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      stopped tragically, then sniffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sausages!&rdquo; she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the
+      kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in
+      Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could
+      teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of
+      clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing,
+      offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of
+      overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness of
+      the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies that
+      others may live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness
+      which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of
+      ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming
+      egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in
+      Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means at
+      his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne was
+      living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in winter,
+      starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury
+      of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water on tap,
+      and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with
+      premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been a
+      fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a
+      reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at the
+      same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub sizzled
+      if one touched it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom;
+      the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress,
+      which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again,
+      opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room,
+      now in chaotic disorder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men already
+      there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing
+      research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from
+      Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne stood
+      by waiting for the hand to be played.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority. It was a
+      regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat in
+      Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie's boiled Wiener sausages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers. MacLean,
+      who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in chips with quick
+      gestures of his long pianist's fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out, and so,
+      after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and fell to betting.
+      Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe, and after a second's
+      hesitation Byrne turned to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know just what to say, Stewart,&rdquo; he began in an undertone. &ldquo;I'm
+      sorry. I didn't want to hurt Marie, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that's all right.&rdquo; Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward to watch
+      the game with an air of ending the discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been kind to
+      me, and I like her. You know that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be an ass!&rdquo; Stewart turned on him sharply. &ldquo;Marie is a little fool,
+      that's all. I didn't know it was an American girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He stayed out of
+      the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about the room. He glanced
+      into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where Marie hovered over the stove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and saw him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come,&rdquo; she called. &ldquo;Watch the supper for me while I go down for more
+      beer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no,&rdquo; he replied, imitating her tone. &ldquo;Watch the supper for me while I
+      go down for more beer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love thee,&rdquo; she called merrily. &ldquo;Tell the Herr Doktor I love thee. And
+      here is the pitcher.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The
+      cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing
+      the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a
+      pinnacle of proprietorship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; he was saying, in reply to something gone before; &ldquo;I used to
+      come here Saturday nights&mdash;used to come early and take a bath.
+      Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit in a corner
+      and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp there, and decent food,
+      and a bed that didn't suffer from necrosis in the center. Then when he was
+      called home I took it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Girl and all, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she is. He
+      came back last fall on his wedding trip&mdash;he married a wealthy girl
+      and came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here. There was the deuce to
+      pay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jealous, eh?&rdquo; from Hunter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him&mdash;said he didn't
+      respect her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a curious code of honor,&rdquo; said Boyer thoughtfully. And indeed to
+      none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl of the streets,
+      driven by God knows what necessity to make her own code and, having made
+      it, living up to it with every fiber of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bitte zum speisen!&rdquo; called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and the men
+      trooped out to the kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in the
+      center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and above all
+      sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer, as did the others,
+      and sang German songs with a frightful accent and much vigor and
+      sentiment, as also did the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and told
+      himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like a prince for
+      the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the hollow center of his
+      bed, where his big figure fitted as comfortably as though it lay in a
+      washtub, and before his eyes there came a vision of Stewart's flat and the
+      slippers by the fire&mdash;which was eminently human.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with considerable
+      vigor, that he'd be damned if he would&mdash;which was eminently Peter
+      Byrne. Almost immediately, with the bed coverings, augmented by his
+      overcoat, drawn snug to his chin, and the better necktie swinging from the
+      gasjet in the air from the opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours
+      he had entirely forgotten Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the little
+      Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a shawl over her
+      shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire, while in the dining-room
+      the little chambermaid cut butter and divided it sparingly among a dozen
+      breakfast trays&mdash;on each tray two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate,
+      a cup. On two trays Olga, with a glance over her shoulder, placed two
+      butter pats. The mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a keen
+      eye for butter&mdash;and a hard heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Katrina came to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hot water is ready,&rdquo; she announced. &ldquo;And the coffee also. Hast thou
+      been to mass?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a lie.&rdquo; This quite on general principle, it being one of the
+      cook's small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her underling,
+      and one of Olga's Sunday morning's indulgences to oversleep and avoid the
+      mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and without reply, being occupied at
+      that moment in standing between Katrina and the extra pats of butter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the lie,&rdquo; said Katrina calmly, &ldquo;thou shalt have no butter this
+      morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it, wicked one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The new Fraulein is American?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Katrina shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall put more water to heat,&rdquo; she said resignedly. &ldquo;The Americans
+      use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood with it
+      poised in her thin young arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The new Fraulein is very beautiful,&rdquo; she continued aloud. &ldquo;Thinkest thou
+      it is the hot water?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?&rdquo; demanded Katrina. &ldquo;Go, and be
+      less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who rings, but the new
+      American.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony's door, and being bidden, entered. The
+      room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her nightgown, was closing
+      the outer casement. The inner still swung open. Olga, having put down her
+      pitcher, shivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always with open windows.&rdquo; Harmony having secured the inner casement, was
+      wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the faded butterflies.
+      Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh. She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the air of the night,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;it is full of mists and illnesses!
+      Will you have breakfast now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In ten minutes, after I have bathed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen, shaking her
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are strange, the Americans!&rdquo; she said to latrine. &ldquo;And if to be
+      lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had passed with
+      the reading of his note, and the sensation of his protection and nearness
+      had been almost physical. In the virginal little apartment in the lodge of
+      Maria Theresa the only masculine presence had been that of the Portier,
+      carrying up coals at ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the accompanist who
+      each alternate day had played for the Big Soprano to practice. And they
+      had felt no deprivation, except for those occasional times when Scatchy
+      developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a dancing-hall or one of
+      the little theaters that opened after the opera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman or
+      disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown herself on
+      the protection of this shabby big American whom she had met but once, and,
+      having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of course, that she realized her
+      dependence. She had felt very old and experienced and exceedingly
+      courageous as she put out her light the night before and took a flying
+      leap into the bed. She was still old and experienced, if a trifle less
+      courageous, that Sunday morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls, two pats of
+      butter&mdash;shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina the thrifty&mdash;and
+      a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper torn from a notebook:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company. Will you
+      walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to ask you, but am
+      spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one remaining American suit
+      is being pressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P. B.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H. W.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway told
+      Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her violin. The idea
+      of work obsessed her. To-morrow there would be the hunt for something to
+      do to supplement her resources, this afternoon she had rashly promised to
+      walk. The morning, then, must be given up to work. But after all she did
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused outside
+      her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter Byrne, listening while
+      he sorted lecture memoranda at his little table in bathrobe and slippers,
+      absently filed the little note with the others&mdash;where he came across
+      it months later&mdash;next to a lecture on McBurney's Point, and spent a
+      sad hour or so over it. Over all the sordid little pension, with its odors
+      of food and stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial flowers,
+      the music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her room across from Harmony's, Anna Gates was sewing, or preparing to
+      sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the room in violent
+      disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting savagely at a roll of pink
+      flannel. Because she was working with curved surgeon's scissors, borrowed
+      from Peter, the cut edges were strangely scalloped. Her method as well as
+      her tools was unique. Clearly she was intent on a body garment, for now
+      and then she picked up the flannel and held it to her. Having thus, as one
+      may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to cut again, jaw tight
+      set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a small replica of Peter Byrne
+      sewing a button on his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong. She rolled
+      up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner, and proceeded to her
+      Sunday morning occupation of putting away the garments she had worn during
+      the week, a vast and motley collection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the irritability of her mood Harmony's music had a late but certain
+      effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than usual, seeing that
+      she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly picked up the bundle from the
+      corner. She hunted about for a thimble, being certain she had brought one
+      from home a year before, but failed to find it. And finally, bundle under
+      her arm and smiling, she knocked at Harmony's door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you mind letting me sit with you?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I'll not stir. I
+      want to sew, and my room is such a mess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony threw the door wide. &ldquo;You will make me very happy, if only my
+      practicing does not disturb you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll probably be the disturbing element,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm a noisy sewer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor
+      immediately. She borrowed a thimble&mdash;not because she cared whether
+      she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the game&mdash;and
+      settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For an hour she
+      plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her bow and
+      turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in her
+      thread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's in the most damnable knot!&rdquo; she said, and Harmony was suddenly aware
+      that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please don't pay any attention to me,&rdquo; she implored. &ldquo;I hate to sew.
+      That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool about
+      music.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps, if you hate to sew&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate being
+      over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and clinics,
+      and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse and as ugly
+      as sin, and I hate never having had any children!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next
+      moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was
+      smiling up through her glasses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm really
+      weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad and I can't
+      afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own cooking, but
+      what time have I?&rdquo; She spread out the pieces of flannel on her knee. &ldquo;Does
+      this look like anything to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A petticoat, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't intend it as a petticoat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought, on account of the scallops&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scallops!&rdquo; Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from them
+      to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scallops!&rdquo; she gasped at last. &ldquo;Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting
+      'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately flushed,
+      repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little adroitnesses
+      to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to Peter&mdash;Peter's
+      future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his hair cut, Peter's
+      encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel Peter almost fought. It
+      developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had the choice of weapons,
+      and had chosen fists, and that the major had been carried away. Dr. Gates
+      grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back on the pink flannel. She
+      confided to Harmony that the various pieces, united, were to make a
+      dressing-gown for a little American boy at the hospital. &ldquo;Although,&rdquo; she
+      commented, &ldquo;it looks more like a chair cover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined with
+      a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the crooked
+      edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the mother
+      who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by
+      dint of skillful listening, which is always better than questioning, the
+      faded little woman doctor knew all the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was rather aghast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose you cannot find anything to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must,&rdquo; simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's such a terrible city for a girl alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not really alone. I know you now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And there is Peter Byrne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; Dr. Gates sniffed. &ldquo;Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any
+      comparison in destitution!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony stiffened a trifle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I do not mean money,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;There are such things as
+      encouragement, and&mdash;and friendliness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One cannot eat encouragement,&rdquo; retorted Dr. Gates sagely. &ldquo;And
+      friendliness between you and any man&mdash;bah! Even Peter is only human,
+      my dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure he is very good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I'm a
+      skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall in love with
+      him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't let him fall in love
+      with you. He probably will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare for
+      lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that a
+      headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised.
+      Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the
+      afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner she
+      repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for the
+      sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty. For
+      illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the spiritual,
+      the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of general practice,
+      had come to view life along physiological lines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best
+      tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To whom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment she
+      thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I said you were only
+      human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot imagine,&rdquo; said Peter slowly, &ldquo;the reason for any conversation
+      about me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it
+      always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then
+      she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody was
+      good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you warned her against me,&rdquo; said Peter grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make 'way
+      with myself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cui bono?&rdquo; demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. &ldquo;The mischief is
+      done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates looked up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm in love with you myself, Peter!&rdquo; she said gratefully. &ldquo;Perhaps it is
+      the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold
+      water that evening and obeyed little Olga's &ldquo;Bitte sum speisen.&rdquo; The
+      chairs round the dining-table were only half occupied&mdash;a free concert
+      had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly
+      considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of
+      the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room
+      far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what
+      he had learned during the week&mdash;his gleanings from near-by tables in
+      coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe,
+      where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met a
+      tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was
+      talking volubly&mdash;as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the
+      scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the girl.
+      Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of the
+      intimacy of the day before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not entirely. Somewhat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer
+      from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid of headache tablets.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what had
+      she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her physician.
+      That was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next time I shall send Olga.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as he
+      might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her
+      new-growing confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a cigarette&mdash;according
+      to the custom of the pension, which accorded the &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen&rdquo; sign the
+      same attention that it did to the portrait of the deceased Herr Schwarz&mdash;that
+      he turned to her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved
+      herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you do not prescribe air?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind my going
+      along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a swift glance
+      of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather exultant
+      himself; certainly he had been adroit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep,&rdquo; said Harmony, who
+      had missed the by-play. &ldquo;And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice companion,
+      I'm sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter had she
+      followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction mattering
+      little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking of
+      immaterial things&mdash;of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of
+      the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the
+      Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the Benk
+      sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting diplomacy
+      to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out what was in
+      his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you don't care a rap about spires. I don't believe
+      you know anything about them. I don't. What did that idiot of a woman
+      doctor say to you to-day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what you mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out with two
+      premises: I'm a man, and you're young and attractive. Then she draws some
+      sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see why we need discuss it,&rdquo; said poor Harmony. &ldquo;Or how you know&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she came to
+      me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to you or not, but&mdash;we'd
+      started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear girl, you are
+      beautiful and I know it. That's all the more reason why, if you'll stand
+      for it, you need some one to look after you&mdash;I'll not say like a
+      brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor brothers to
+      their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and who isn't
+      going to fall in love with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not. Besides, I&mdash;&rdquo; Here Peter Byrne had another
+      inspiration, not so good as the first&mdash;&ldquo;Besides, there is somebody at
+      home, you understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A girl at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A girl,&rdquo; said Peter, lying manfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How very nice!&rdquo; said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all
+      sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of
+      their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers and
+      street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to themselves.
+      Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked blissful
+      personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money&mdash;or its lack&mdash;their
+      ambitions, their hopes, even&mdash;and here was intimacy, indeed!&mdash;their
+      disappointments, their failures of courage, their occasional loss of faith
+      in themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward the
+      Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a chilly cold
+      that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of the Votivkirche
+      were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took on, against the
+      gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for an occasional
+      pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the streets were
+      deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl rejected his
+      offer of a taxicab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We should be home too quickly,&rdquo; she observed naively. &ldquo;And we have so
+      much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English lessons
+      in the afternoon and working all morning at my music&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely, his
+      head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what a
+      precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very slender
+      her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep into
+      his soul that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a
+      friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they
+      were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned in
+      at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided with
+      Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled
+      mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin heart
+      in his voice, the barcarolle from the &ldquo;Tales&rdquo; of Hoffmann. He saw Harmony,
+      and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would have
+      pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is only the Portier from the lodge,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note,
+      stood before Harmony, bowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad,&rdquo; he said thickly. &ldquo;There is no
+      more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has
+      only one lung.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But think!&rdquo; Harmony said in German. &ldquo;No more practicing in the early
+      dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is
+      better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and
+      bowed after them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gute Nacht,&rdquo; he called. &ldquo;Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the
+      salon and a bath of the finest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his
+      unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the
+      Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mind if I ask one question?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You honor me, madam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;what is the name of the girl back home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine
+      names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emma.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!&rdquo; But there was a touch of
+      disappointment in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the
+      master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a grain
+      of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had
+      been right&mdash;she had the real thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself to
+      an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the
+      anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his
+      rare enthusiasms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Six months,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and you will go back to your America and show them
+      how over here we teach violin. I will a letter&mdash;letters&mdash;give
+      you, and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my
+      pupil, is it not so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with
+      the praise and excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I can stay so long,&rdquo; she answered unsteadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished you
+      talk of going! Gott im Himmel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something
+      to do I shall have to go back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse his
+      ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He spent five
+      minutes in indignant protest, then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay. Perhaps
+      I can now and then find a concert for you.&rdquo; It was a lure he had thrown
+      out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being always eagerly
+      swallowed. &ldquo;And no more talk of going away. I refuse to allow. You shall
+      not go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was interested.
+      He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen is fifty Kronen,
+      and South American beef is high of price. He followed Harmony into the
+      outer room and bowed her out of his studio.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein has paid?&rdquo; he demanded, turning sharply to the lady
+      secretary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After the lesson?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja, Herr Professor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is better,&rdquo; said the master, &ldquo;that she pay hereafter before the
+      lesson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja, Herr Professor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's name.
+      There were many such crosses on the ledger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the morning,
+      hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment it was over.
+      He had lectures in the evenings, too, and although he lingered for an hour
+      or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken possession of by the
+      little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for things American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and
+      helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little
+      Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the
+      stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of the
+      man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid tread. The
+      two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals without speech
+      between them were rather for lack of understanding than for that
+      completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was the first
+      to speak after their greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marie all right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks. Does it matter which night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say Friday, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood
+      failed to notice it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wake up, Byrne!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You remember well enough. Neither the Days nor
+      any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you go on
+      living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double drain
+      there that tells on one&mdash;eating little and being eaten much. Those
+      old walls are full of vermin. Why don't you take our apartment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and Breidau can't
+      take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and we're going to
+      Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead enough to take a holiday. And
+      if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or less,
+      you can have it, and&mdash;a home, old man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted
+      him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, all right.&rdquo; Stewart was rather offended. &ldquo;I can't do more than give
+      you a chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of Sunday
+      had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday and Tuesday. The
+      sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and the
+      smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in
+      depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of
+      musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses
+      as they worked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his up-turned collar;
+      moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather than
+      precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a vision of the
+      little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the table, and the general
+      air of warmth and cheer, and a figure presiding over the brick stove in
+      the kitchen. Byrne shook himself like a great dog and turned in at the
+      gate of the hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned she
+      faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that
+      frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against barriers
+      of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far from
+      absolute cruelty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then, as the
+      pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen&mdash;also in advance,&mdash;went
+      on, recklessly. She played marvelously those days, crying out through her
+      violin the despair she had sealed her lips against. On Thursday, playing
+      for the master, she turned to find him flourishing his handkerchief, and
+      went home in a sort of daze, incredulous that she could have moved him to
+      tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up the
+      coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the chance of
+      seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe
+      Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle of
+      native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the little
+      Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was simmering in
+      those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But instead he had
+      kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray words, odd
+      glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind her ears. For
+      reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one of those
+      inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in troubled
+      Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher on the
+      fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that made even
+      that grim official smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically: so many
+      hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many afternoons
+      searching for something to do, making rounds of shops where her English
+      might be valuable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one
+      experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears in her
+      eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first interview, under
+      Peter's grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper was obviously suspicious
+      of Peter. After that, whenever he could escape from clinics, Peter went
+      along, but stayed outside, smoking his eternal cigarette, and keeping a
+      watchful eye on things inside the shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was not well,
+      from the girl's eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper's face, he had opened
+      the door in time to hear enough. He had lifted the proprietor bodily and
+      flung him with a crash into a glass showcase of ornaments for the hair.
+      Then, entirely cheerful and happy, and unmolested by the frightened
+      clerks, he led Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic triumph bought
+      her a bunch of valley lilies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very bad,
+      indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own
+      feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did a
+      quixotic thing&mdash;which was Peter, of course, all over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea came to him
+      there. Hardly came to him, being Marie's originally. The little flat was
+      cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened her kitchen, brought in a
+      waist she was making and sat sewing while the two men talked. Their
+      conversation was technical, a new extirpation of the thyroid gland, a
+      recent nephrectomy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She struggled with
+      the technicalities of their talk as she sewed, finding here and there a
+      comprehensive bit. At those times she sat, needle poised, intelligent eyes
+      on the speakers, until she lost herself again in the mazes of their
+      English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten o'clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her get the
+      stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening beer. He took
+      advantage of her absence to broach the matter of Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's up against it, as a matter of fact,&rdquo; he finished. &ldquo;It ought to be
+      easy enough for her to find something, but it isn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she's rather handsome,
+      isn't she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's one of the difficulties. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart smoked and reflected. &ldquo;No friends here at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could she teach violin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't there any kids in the American colony who want lessons? There's
+      usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any entertainments of
+      the Doctors' Club.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They don't want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I could put a
+      card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!&rdquo; cried Peter with a burst of
+      honest resentment, &ldquo;why do I have to be poor?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money, could you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he found in
+      his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was carefully filling the
+      mugs. &ldquo;Why do you not marry her?&rdquo; she asked unexpectedly. &ldquo;Then you could
+      take this flat. We are going to Semmering for the winter sports. I would
+      show her about the stove.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marry her, of course!&rdquo; said Peter gravely. &ldquo;Just pick her up and carry
+      her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to marry me need
+      have nothing to do with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but does she not wish it?&rdquo; demanded Marie. &ldquo;Are you so certain,
+      stupid big one? Do not women always love you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back to the
+      Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest, almost humble. It
+      had never occurred to him that women might care for him for himself. In
+      his struggling life there had been little time for women. But about
+      himself as the solution of a problem&mdash;that was different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the girl's being
+      willing, was Stewart right&mdash;could two people live as cheaply as one?
+      Marie was an Austrian and knew how to manage&mdash;that was different. And
+      another thing troubled him. He dreaded to disturb the delicate adjustment
+      of their relationship; the terra incognita of a young girl's mind daunted
+      him. There was another consideration which he put resolutely in the back
+      of his mind&mdash;his career. He had seen many a promising one killed by
+      early marriage, men driven to the hack work of the profession by the
+      scourge of financial necessity. But that was a matter of the future; the
+      necessity was immediate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered Schneeberg
+      drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress defended by the
+      elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized again. Peter Byrne
+      battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he fought he made his decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of
+      the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and
+      in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost ran
+      up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the key and
+      he swore under his breath. He slammed the door behind him. Peter always
+      slammed doors, and had an apologetic way of opening the door again and
+      closing it gently, as if to show that he could. Harmony's room was dark,
+      but he had surprised her once into a confession that when she was very
+      downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue indeed. So he
+      stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from Dr. Gates's room across
+      there came a hum of conversation. He knew at once that Harmony was there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand over his
+      hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries to a proposal of
+      marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in
+      deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and
+      pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still under way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Come in and get warm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round her
+      shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please go out!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I am not dressed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are covered,&rdquo; returned Anna Gates. &ldquo;That's all that any sort of
+      clothing can do. Don't mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed. Look out for
+      pins!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed door and
+      stared at Harmony&mdash;Harmony in the red light from the little open door
+      of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit of white petticoat;
+      Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and tied out of her eyes with an
+      encircling band of rosy flannel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do sit!&rdquo; cried Anna Gates. &ldquo;You fill the room so. Bless you, Peter, what
+      a collar!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve of
+      proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter, seated now
+      on the bed, writhed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rapped at Miss Wells's door,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You were not there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This last, of course, to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had something to say to you. I&mdash;I dare say it is hardly pension
+      etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say it there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony smiled above the flannel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could you call it through the door?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hardly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fiddlesticks!&rdquo; said Dr. Gates, rising. &ldquo;I'll go over, of course, but not
+      for long. There's no fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please!&rdquo; she implored. &ldquo;I am not dressed and I'd rather not.&rdquo; She turned
+      to Peter. &ldquo;You can say it before her, can't you? She&mdash;I have told her
+      all about things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that night. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment furnished&mdash;you
+      could learn to use the stove, unless, of course, you don't like
+      housekeeping&mdash;and food is really awfully cheap. Why, at these
+      delicatessen places and bakeshops&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates's quizzical glance fixed on
+      him, and Harmony's startled eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I am trying to say,&rdquo; he exploded, &ldquo;is that I believe if you would
+      marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow.&rdquo; He was talking for
+      time now, against Harmony's incredulous face. &ldquo;You'd be taking on others,
+      of course. I'm not much and I'm as poor&mdash;well, you know. It&mdash;it
+      was the apartment that gave me the idea&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the stove!&rdquo; said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous laughter.
+      After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It was real mirth
+      with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that curious laughter of women that
+      is not far from tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and made a last
+      feeble attempt to stick to his guns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean it. You know I'm not in love with you or you with me, of course.
+      But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might get along. Lord
+      knows I need some one to look after me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Emma?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no Emma. I made her up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony sobered at that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is only&rdquo;&mdash;she gasped a little for breath&mdash;&ldquo;it is only your&mdash;your
+      transparency, Peter.&rdquo; It was the first time she had called him Peter. &ldquo;You
+      know how things are with me and you want to help me, and out of your
+      generosity you are willing to take on another burden. Oh, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat the
+      laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the cover of mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them both
+      sternly through her glasses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once for all,&rdquo; she said brusquely, &ldquo;let such foolishness end. Peter, I am
+      ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you&mdash;not yet, not for a dozen
+      years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not every man can be what
+      you may be if you keep your senses and stay single. And the same is true
+      for you, girl. To tide over a bad six months you would sacrifice the very
+      thing you are both struggling for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure we don't intend to do it,&rdquo; replied Harmony meekly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes, remember what
+      I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal to the other. Now go
+      away and let me alone. I'm not accustomed to proposals of marriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself off to the
+      bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was as comfortable as a
+      washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also Harmony's problem was yet
+      unsolved. Also she had called him Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to warm
+      the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked at his
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; said Peter, still comfortably asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is Dr. Gates.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry, Doctor&mdash;have to 'xcuse me,&rdquo; mumbled Peter from the blanket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open the door just a crack.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up to
+      retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast from the open window blew
+      round him, setting everything movable in the little room to quivering. He
+      fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them, and yawning
+      noisily went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair was out of
+      its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait down
+      her back. She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered
+      shortsightedly at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's about Jimmy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don't know what's got into me, but I've
+      forgotten for three days. It's a good bit more than time for a letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great Scott!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a little.
+      The nurse found him crying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The poor little devil!&rdquo; said Peter contritely. &ldquo;Overdue, is it? I'll fix
+      it to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I'm off at
+      seven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The envelope?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is. And take my candle. I'm going to bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from the twin
+      clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across the
+      city. It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a candle
+      balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had
+      taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry, which
+      weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter being
+      strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine chamois.
+      Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy's point of view and
+      deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a harrowing
+      incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a sort of
+      glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off the
+      chamois.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to Jimmy
+      Conroy&mdash;an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic,
+      bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny
+      village in the Austrian Tyrol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to
+      sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was just two o'clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her ward in
+      the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his pillow, and
+      taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, thou bad one!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Awake, when the Herr Doktor orders sleep!
+      Shall I use the slipper?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the
+      mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter of a
+      certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father has
+      perhaps captured a great boar, or a&mdash;a chamois, and he writes of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do chamois have horns?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja. Great horns&mdash;so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None. Now sleep, or&mdash;the slipper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      So far Harmony's small world in the old city had consisted of Scatchy and
+      the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off in the firmament the
+      master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone, weeping anxious postcards
+      from every way station it is true, but nevertheless gone. Peter and Anna
+      Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds held out. To them now
+      she was about to add Jimmy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor's chaos of pink
+      flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and complete even
+      to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to be presented. It was
+      with mingled emotions that Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to Harmony
+      the next morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He hasn't been so well the last day or two,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He doesn't sleep
+      much&mdash;that's the worst of those heart conditions. Sometimes, while
+      I've been working on this thing, I've wondered&mdash;Well, we're making a
+      fight anyhow. And better take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and
+      make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital, meeting the
+      doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy's little story quite
+      well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear,&rdquo; she had finished. &ldquo;You
+      think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I think I have my
+      own little tragedy, because I have to go through the rest of life alone,
+      when taken in time I'd have been a good wife and mother. Still I have my
+      work. But this little chap, brought over here by a father who hoped to see
+      him cured, and spent all he had to bring him here, and then&mdash;died. It
+      gets me by the throat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the boy does not know?&rdquo; Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the mountains. When
+      we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he was buried. It took about
+      all the money there was. He wrote home about it, too, to the place they
+      came from. There has never been any reply. Then ever since Peter has
+      written these letters. Jimmy lives for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that. Peter thought
+      thus. A very large part of Harmony's life was Peter in those days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for Anna
+      Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his letter
+      that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of the night
+      before. Of the proposal, most of all&mdash;it was so eminently
+      characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its execution.
+      Harmony's thought of Peter was very tender that morning as she stood in
+      the arched gateway out of reach of the wind from the Schneeberg. The
+      tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made her very
+      beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for a bus, and
+      stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm, recognized and admired
+      her. After all, the American women were chic, she decided, although some
+      of the doctors had wives of a dowdiness&mdash;Himmel! And she could copy
+      the Fraulein's hat for two Kronen and a bit of ribbon she possessed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a Dozent
+      with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into it, and the
+      Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could not marry because
+      the hospital board forbade it, made a speech for Jimmy in awe-inspiring
+      German, ending up with a poem that was intended to be funny, but that made
+      the nurses cry. From which it will be seen that Jimmy was a great
+      favorite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a ceremony, Jimmy
+      kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates's hand and waited. That the
+      letter had come was enough. He lay back in anticipatory joy, and let
+      himself be talked over, and bathrobed, and his hair parted Austrian
+      fashion and turned up over a finger, which is very Austrian indeed. He
+      liked Harmony. The girl caught his eyes on her more than once. He
+      interrupted the speech once to ask her just what part of the robe she had
+      made, and whether she had made the tassel. When she admitted the tassel,
+      his admiration became mixed with respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the barred window
+      behind Jimmy's bed, and brought into dazzling radiance the pink bathrobe,
+      and Harmony's eyes, and fat Nurse Elisabet's white apron. It lay on the
+      bedspread in great squares, outlined by the shadows of the window bars.
+      Now and then the sentry, pacing outside, would advance as far as Jimmy's
+      window, and a warlike silhouette of military cap and the upper end of a
+      carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events, however, were rare,
+      the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and the odor of boiling
+      onions from the lodge just inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the nurses went
+      about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a hairpin from her
+      hair and made a great show of opening the many times opened envelope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The letter at last!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Shall I read it or will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You read it. It takes me so long. I'll read it all day, after you are
+      gone. I always do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter's first halting
+      lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold. They were mainly an
+      apology for the delay. Then forgetting discomfort in the joy of creation,
+      he became more comfortable. The account of the near-accident was
+      wonderfully graphic; the description of the chamois was fervid, if not
+      accurate. But consternation came with the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The doctor
+      read on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven's sake,&rdquo; said Peter's frantic postscript, &ldquo;find out how much a
+      medium-sized chamois&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates stopped &ldquo;&mdash;ought to weigh,&rdquo; was the rest of it, &ldquo;and fix it
+      right in the letter. The kid's too smart to be fooled and I never saw a
+      chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns, haven't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's funny!&rdquo; said Jimmy Conway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake,&rdquo; remarked Dr. Gates,
+      with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; observed Harmony, leaning forward, &ldquo;that little boys must not
+      ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is only six weeks off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the boar's
+      tusks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter of a boar,
+      had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of tusks. The tusks had not
+      been so difficult. But horns!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more questions. The
+      morning's excitement had tired him, and he lay back. Dr. Gates went to
+      hold a whispered consultation with the nurse, and came back, looking
+      grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony&mdash;to find some
+      one worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire of women to do
+      something, however small, for some one else. Her own troubles looked very
+      small to her that day as she left the hospital and stepped out into the
+      bright sunshine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you wish to do a very kind thing?&rdquo; she asked in German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea, and nay,
+      nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the sun was
+      moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you wish?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do not
+      think&mdash;perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not, now and
+      then, pass the window? It pleases him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pass the window! But why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and the gun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, the gun!&rdquo; He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an officer
+      appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he stiffened
+      into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the girl knew he
+      would do as she had desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the professors
+      at the hospital desired English conversation at two Kronen an hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony was
+      engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did much more than
+      offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her self-confidence,
+      although the immediate result was rather tragic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with Harmony,
+      engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that afternoon. It was
+      the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived five minutes late, panting,
+      hat awry, and so full of the Frau Professor Bergmeister that she could
+      think of nothing else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her fifty Kronen
+      before the secretary as she went in. The master was out of humor. Should
+      he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept waiting for a chit of a girl&mdash;only,
+      of course, he said &ldquo;das Kindchen&rdquo; or some other German equivalent for chit&mdash;and
+      then have her come into the sacred presence breathless, and salute him
+      between gasps as the Frau Professor Bergmeister?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also rather
+      tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped her
+      bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one's infant child
+      from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage when with
+      a lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at Harmony. Then
+      with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked to the outer room, and
+      picking up the envelope with the fifty Kronen held it out to her without a
+      word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly at the
+      envelope in her hand, at the master's retreating back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled together.
+      Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady secretary touched her
+      arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is sorry.
+      You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will be well. You are
+      his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat for grief that he has
+      hurt you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary's voice was unmistakable.
+      Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the two students who had
+      laughed. They were not laughing now. Something of fellowship and
+      understanding passed between them in the glance. After all, it was in the
+      day's work&mdash;would come to one of them next, perhaps. And they had
+      much in common&mdash;the struggle, their faith, the everlasting
+      loneliness, the little white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of days, Harmony
+      went down the three long flights and out into the brightness of the winter
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward her, giving
+      a definite impression of being bound for some particular destination and
+      of being behind time. That this was not the case was shown by the celerity
+      with which, when he saw Harmony, he turned about and walked with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had an hour or two,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;and I thought I'd walk. But walking
+      is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk alone. How about the Frau
+      Professor?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has taken me on. I'm very happy. But, Dr. Byrne&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You called me Peter last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was different. You had just proposed to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if that's all that's necessary&mdash;&rdquo; He stopped in the center of
+      the busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For instance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never owned anything taxable except a dog&mdash;and that wasn't a tax
+      anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or surgery,
+      where I'd be of some use?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I've got something to say on that.&rdquo; He pulled from his overcoat
+      pocket a largish bundle&mdash;Peter always bulged with packages&mdash;and
+      held it out for her to see. &ldquo;Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my
+      compliments,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that because some idiot at home sent me five
+      pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here, I
+      have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian
+      customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty. I
+      offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars was
+      fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She reached over
+      and patted his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll make it up in some way. Can't you cut off some little
+      extravagance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might cut down on my tailor bills.&rdquo; He looked down at himself
+      whimsically. &ldquo;Or on ties. I'm positively reckless about ties!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that
+      eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a dog-trot.
+      Peter looked at them critically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bosnians,&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out of
+      ten of them tubercular. It's a rotten game, this military play of Europe.
+      How's Jimmy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We left him very happy with your letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter flushed. &ldquo;I expect it was pretty poor stuff,&rdquo; he apologized. &ldquo;I've
+      never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says his father will surely send him the horns.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an eagle?
+      One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the
+      letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he
+      talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only
+      there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club at
+      home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his hobby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scum of the earth, most of them,&rdquo; he said, his plain face glowing. &ldquo;Dirty
+      little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco; and one of
+      them pawned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing the game
+      right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them! Used to line 'em
+      up and make 'em spell, and the two best spellers were allowed to fight it
+      out with gloves&mdash;my own method, and it worked. Spell! They'd spell
+      their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee, how I hated to give
+      them up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before.
+      For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always
+      seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother
+      attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof. Peter
+      felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension
+      Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in ulster
+      and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was coming down
+      with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up the staircase
+      like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed Peter and
+      Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been waiting for you two,&rdquo; she flung at them. &ldquo;I've had a terrific
+      row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after
+      everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung, at
+      first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the sharp
+      little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, child.&rdquo; Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. &ldquo;You are fagged
+      out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much did
+      it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it
+      will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper, I'm
+      sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,
+      and Harmony shall keep house for us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in the
+      cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the conversational bomb
+      that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of
+      Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars&mdash;back, but with a
+      difference. True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges,
+      obedient to every whim of the December gales; but the casement windows in
+      the salon no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll
+      of rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented
+      extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a battered
+      but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a table with an
+      oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove gleamed warm with
+      fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined medical books of Peter
+      and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they used in common.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria Theresa.
+      But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the stove open,
+      and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed, with Harmony
+      playing softly, it took resolution on Peter's part to put on his overcoat
+      and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a discussion of the
+      function of the pituitary body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only
+      greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal, which
+      had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they bought in
+      quantity and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp was a trifle.
+      They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across boasted a deer
+      from the mountains. They had other game occasionally, when Peter, carrying
+      home a mysterious package, would make them guess what it might contain.
+      Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits. She knew how to cook
+      rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing to
+      make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance of
+      Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the
+      tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch
+      him. Peter was firm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be too obstinate, Peter,&rdquo; she admonished him. &ldquo;The child needs
+      occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the
+      financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her
+      heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur from
+      Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna almost
+      to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make certain of
+      her usefulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier
+      shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of the
+      brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the Austrians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least of
+      all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women, and
+      Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound or two
+      in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was growing
+      round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real change was
+      in Harmony herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which
+      such changes come&mdash;not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a
+      breath. One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion,
+      quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional introspection
+      and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman, tender but not
+      shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified on occasion, but
+      with little girlish lapses into frolic and high spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had been
+      settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the Pension
+      Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be recalled,
+      along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every odor of
+      stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had had a bad
+      week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In vain the
+      sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and nodded through
+      it; in vain&mdash;when the street was deserted and there was none to
+      notice&mdash;he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the pavement
+      outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and ringing clang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing
+      unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as never
+      was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he carefully
+      emphasized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the aid
+      of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the barred
+      window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had almost
+      fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the manual of
+      arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all most
+      exciting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken him
+      some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in jelly
+      and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had been a
+      great success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near his
+      heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The horns haven't come, have they?&rdquo; he asked wistfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think he got my letter about them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He answered it, didn't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy drew a long breath. &ldquo;It's very funny. He's mostly so quick. If I had
+      the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the bed.
+      And I could pretend I was hunting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw
+      hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store a
+      fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head
+      down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the
+      shop door as if mutely begging admission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.
+      Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The wild-game
+      seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he would mount head
+      and antlers for his wife's cousin in Galicia as a Christmas gift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was profoundly
+      depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early and was
+      building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile. Anna was not
+      yet home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a
+      movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always beautiful,
+      but&mdash;you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is because you like me. We always think our friends are beautiful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table, and
+      Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast fading
+      into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few street
+      sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from the world
+      of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying humanity, lay
+      the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed halls, its dark and
+      twisting staircases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with the
+      girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had been
+      growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was very
+      comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
+      Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are
+      written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger
+      gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed
+      gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship,
+      and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does not
+      thrive on hunger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the
+      struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy life.
+      Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken himself
+      savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the luxury of
+      tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck. So he had
+      kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And now!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he was
+      much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands
+      hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features. Harmony,
+      knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you are sad to-night, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Depressed a bit. That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't money again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before
+      Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a
+      hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been
+      very upsetting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not more than usual. Don't mind me. I'll probably end in a roaring bad
+      temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested a
+      hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have hurt you in some way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could&mdash;could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wouldn't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't quarreled with Anna?&rdquo; Harmony asked, real concern in her
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Good Lord, Harmony, don't ask me what's wrong! I don't know myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the wall.
+      Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen was
+      entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare floor and
+      the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and the candle
+      when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dearest,&rdquo; he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him, was
+      kissing her lips, her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him. The
+      gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved
+      senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go.
+      Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had
+      torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left her
+      only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him breathing.
+      He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that was left in
+      him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms again and keep
+      her there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned and
+      faced him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter,&rdquo; she said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't any question about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still
+      obsessed him. &ldquo;Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If there is
+      a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and loneliness&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has not made me happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual.
+      Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He knew
+      then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would rather not talk about it, please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and
+      was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and,
+      after his habit, shook himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, we'll not talk of it. But, for Heaven's sake, Harmony, don't
+      avoid me. I'm not a cad. I'll let you alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of promise
+      from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered the
+      kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an already
+      overfed stove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty city
+      fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two hours
+      later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers
+      nothing, the Portier's wife awakened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the
+      Portier's wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the
+      Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen
+      seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he
+      ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic
+      respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like
+      evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier's wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing to
+      the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping that
+      day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty air. Words
+      had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in
+      unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up&mdash;the floor was cold
+      and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer
+      across the street, as it swung on its hook?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron
+      candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the Portier's
+      pillow. No startled yell followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier's wife forgot the cold floor and the
+      wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even stood
+      open an inch or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door and
+      waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned kept her
+      warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an hour. The
+      candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice to red-hot
+      fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain swung in the
+      wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had changed
+      to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert Society&mdash;What
+      was that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now lighted,
+      and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou hast been out of thy bed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An hour since the bed was empty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou dreamest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The chain is off the door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the Americans above?
+      Sleep and keep peace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier's wife crawled into
+      her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson feather comfort. But
+      her soul was shaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones out to do
+      his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might be told by the soles
+      of the feet, which were always soiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At dawn the Portier's wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her sleeping
+      lord's feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite black, as of one who
+      had tramped in garden mould.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened the door
+      from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set out a pitcher for
+      the milk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across the
+      street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was written the one
+      word, &ldquo;Still!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps by which
+      the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great leaps but with a
+      thousand small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves its mark, a
+      footprint on a naked soul. We trace a life by its scars, as a tree by its
+      rings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and this with
+      every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine affection for the
+      girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions that
+      Harmony's veil had been woven. To Anna Gates, worn with a thousand
+      sleepless nights, a thousand thankless days, withered before her time with
+      the struggling routine of medical practice, sapped with endless calls for
+      sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became
+      physiological.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was rent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious creed, a
+      philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung strange
+      bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities, personal
+      liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law and the
+      prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and her prophet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no mischief.
+      Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even in the event of the
+      opportunity it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength of her
+      convictions. Men love theories, but seldom have the courage of them, and
+      Anna Gates was largely masculine. Women, being literal, are apt to absorb
+      dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When it is false doctrine they
+      discover it too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was now a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to
+      harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony's eyes
+      widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased her more
+      than to pit her individualism against the girl's rigid and conventional
+      morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took place&mdash;hardly
+      an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing. Anna had taken a
+      heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been practicing, and at the
+      end she played a little winter song by some modern composer. It breathed
+      all the purity of a white winter's day; it was as chaste as ice and as
+      cold; and yet throughout was the thought of green things hiding beneath
+      the snow and the hope of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather ashamed
+      of her thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems that way to me,&rdquo; she finished apologetically. &ldquo;It sounds rather
+      silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes certain
+      things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this gentleman who writes of winter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it, exactly
+      as in books&mdash;the difference between a love story and&mdash;and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;a dictionary!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You always laugh,&rdquo; Harmony complained
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in
+      this world I want to weep always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there
+      are good ones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are plenty of good men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you call a good man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Honorable men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna smiled. &ldquo;My dear child,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you substitute the code of a
+      gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!
+      When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.
+      To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman&mdash;and a fifth over&mdash;for
+      every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples there is a
+      derelict like myself, mateless.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her
+      resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless, brought
+      forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the atmosphere in
+      which Harmony had been reared single women were always presumed to be thus
+      by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those weaker sisters who
+      had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly a derelict, frankly
+      regretted her maiden condition and railed with bitterness against her
+      enforced childlessness. The near approach of Christmas had for years found
+      her morose and resentful. There are, here and there, such women,
+      essentially mothers but not necessarily wives, their sole passion that of
+      maternity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her
+      resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and offered
+      her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of the
+      individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and though
+      refusing to accept Anna's theories, found her faith in her own weakened.
+      She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up out of her
+      discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written high in its
+      firmament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the girl's
+      stricken face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a fool!&rdquo; she said contritely. &ldquo;If Peter had been here he'd have
+      throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and theorists
+      are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about us&mdash;we
+      never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I've been
+      talking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for
+      Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony
+      from New York. The Big Soprano was very glad to be back and spent two
+      pages over her chances for concert work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;... I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had had the
+      money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing 'Brunnhilde,' it would have
+      helped a lot. I could have said I'd sung in opera in Europe and at least
+      have had a hearing at the Met. But I didn't, and I'm back at the church
+      again and glad to get my old salary. If it's at all possible, stay until
+      the master has presented you in a concert. He's quite right, you haven't a
+      chance unless he does. And now I'll quit grumbling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely, flushed with
+      excitement and having been up since dawn curling her hair. He was rather a
+      disappointment&mdash;small and blond, with light blue eyes, and almost
+      dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn't care how pale a man's eyes were if he
+      looked at me the way Henry looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to be alone
+      together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could swallow for the lump in
+      my throat, by myself. I was homesick enough in old Wien, but I am just as
+      homesick now that I am here, for we are really homesick only for people,
+      not places. And no one really cared whether I came back or not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day before, but
+      with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the situation was unpleasant
+      and decide to leave? What if a reckless impulse, recklessly carried out,
+      were to break up an arrangement that had made a green oasis of happiness
+      and content for all of them in the desert of their common despair?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to argue, to
+      justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally. He almost groaned
+      aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the wintry garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his word. &ldquo;I am
+      not a beast. I'll let you alone,&rdquo; he had said. She had had a bad night, as
+      nights go. She had gone through the painful introspection which, in a
+      thoroughly good girl, always follows such an outburst as Peter's. Had she
+      said or done anything to make him think&mdash;Surely she had not! Had she
+      been wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an unaccustomed
+      silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron candlestick in hand,
+      Harmony, having read the Litany through in the not particularly religious
+      hope of getting to sleep, was dreaming placidly. It was Peter who tossed
+      and turned almost all night. Truly there had been little sleep that night
+      in the old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the kitchen while
+      supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories forgotten and wearing a
+      knitted shawl against drafts, was making a salad, and Harmony, all anxiety
+      and flushed with heat, was broiling a steak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and prayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter,&rdquo; she called, &ldquo;you may set the table. And try to lay the cloth
+      straight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched business
+      of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose I refuse?&rdquo; he questioned. &ldquo;You&mdash;you haven't been very
+      friendly with me to-day, Harry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't quarrel, you children,&rdquo; cried Anna, beating eggs vigorously.
+      &ldquo;Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The Portier loves her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure I said good-evening to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You usually say, 'Good-evening, Peter.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I did not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You did not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;Good-evening, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday's
+      promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with forgiveness and
+      restoration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; said Peter humbly, &ldquo;when I am in very great favor, you say,
+      'Good-evening, Peter, dear.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-evening, Peter, dear,&rdquo; said Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving smoothly.
+      Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and through Marie's frugality
+      and the extra month's wages at Christmas, which was Marie's annual
+      perquisite, being temporarily in funds the sky seemed clear enough, and
+      Walter Stewart started on his holiday with a comfortable sense of
+      financial security.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie's temporary exile
+      in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of the
+      little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with long
+      inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's kitchen and
+      the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She disapproved of Stewart,
+      having heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or
+      suspicious about this orderly establishment. Mrs. Boyer was a placid,
+      motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card club, her grown
+      children, her household gods of thirty years' accumulation, that &ldquo;Frank&rdquo;
+       might catch up with his profession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had explained it rather tremulously at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father wants to go,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You children are big enough now to be
+      left. He's always wanted to do it, but we couldn't go while you were
+      little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, mother!&rdquo; expostulated the oldest girl. &ldquo;When you are so afraid of
+      the ocean! And a year!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is to be will be,&rdquo; she had replied. &ldquo;If I'm going to be drowned I'll
+      be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub. And I'll not let
+      father go alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the children
+      gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so elaborate a
+      wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase anything abroad.
+      She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest her eyes lead her
+      into the temptation of the shops. In Vienna she wore her home-town outfit
+      with determination, vaguely conscious that the women about her had more
+      style, were different. She priced unsuitable garments wistfully, and went
+      home to her trunks full of best materials that would never wear out. The
+      children, knowing her, had bought the best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is hard to say
+      by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory. It was
+      as though his own status gained by it. He had much the same feeling about
+      the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as if
+      irregularity were thus regularized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn an
+      experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn under
+      her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very pretty, rather
+      frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so
+      conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart breaking the law and
+      trying to keep the letter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There was much to
+      do. The house must be left clean and shining. There must be no feminine
+      gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely masculine
+      establishment. At the last moment, so late that it sent her heart into her
+      mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from Stewart's watchful
+      eyes. She gave it to the milk girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr Doktor's
+      American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy, bound with iron.
+      And with her own clothing she packed Stewart's, the dress-suit he had worn
+      once to the Embassy, a hat that folded, strange American shoes, and books&mdash;always
+      books. The Herr Doktor would study at Semmering. When all was in readiness
+      and Stewart was taking a final survey, Marie ran downstairs and summoned a
+      cab. It did not occur to her to ask him to do it. Marie's small life was
+      one of service, and besides there was an element in their relationship
+      that no one but Marie suspected, and that she hid even from herself. She
+      was very much in love with this indifferent American, this captious
+      temporary god of her domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred
+      to Stewart; but Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had more
+      than once caught a look in Marie's eyes as she turned them on the other
+      man, and had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the train was well under way, however, and he found no disturbing
+      element among the three others in the compartment, Stewart relaxed.
+      Semmering was a favorite resort with the American colony, but not until
+      later in the winter. In December there were rains in the mountains, and
+      low-lying clouds that invested some of the chalets in constant fog. It was
+      not until the middle of January that the little mountain train became
+      crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and jaunty
+      feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with Alpine cloaks
+      and iron-pointed sticks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her life,
+      and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very shadow of the
+      Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles or so away
+      above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed the cog railroad, she
+      had seen its white head turn rosy in the setting sun, and once when a
+      German tourist from Munich had handed her his fieldglass she had even made
+      out some of the crosses that showed where travelers had met their deaths.
+      Now she would be very close. If the weather were good, she might even say
+      a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of those who had died.
+      It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when one has money and
+      leisure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up the
+      mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were moments when the
+      track held to the cliffs only by gigantic fingers of steel, while far
+      below were peaceful valleys and pink-and-blue houses and churches with
+      gilded spires. There were vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed, and
+      always there were tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a child in
+      others; she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched him for
+      comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so dark,&rdquo; she apologized, &ldquo;and it frightens me, the mountain heart.
+      In your America, have you so great mountains?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood racing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much larger,&rdquo; he said magnificently. &ldquo;I haven't seen a hill in Europe I'd
+      exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the mountains there we use
+      railway coaches. These toy railroads are a joke. At home we'd use 'em as
+      street-cars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really! I should like to see America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So should I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America was apt
+      to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him, which was even
+      worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not repulsed, became silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left the
+      train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the platform beer
+      and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train resumed its clanking
+      progress they ate luncheon, drinking the beer from the bottles and slicing
+      the sausage with a penknife. It was a joyous trip, a red-letter day in the
+      girl's rather sordid if not uneventful life. The Herr Doktor was pleased
+      with her. He liked her hat, and when she flushed with pleasure demanded
+      proof that she was not rouged. Proof was forthcoming. She rubbed her
+      cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and produced in triumph its
+      unreddened purity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou suspicious one!&rdquo; she pouted. &ldquo;I must take off the skin to assure
+      thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a good child.&rdquo; He stooped over and kissed one scarlet cheek and
+      then being very comfortable and the beer having made him drowsy, he put
+      his head in her lap and slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered above and
+      the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near. They were
+      frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were long lines of granite
+      avalanche sheds. The little passage of the car was full of tourists
+      looking down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are very close, I am sure,&rdquo; an American girl was saying just outside
+      the doorway. &ldquo;See, isn't that the Kurhaus? There, it is lost again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had spoken was
+      young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the first time and moved to
+      a more decorous distance from Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her thoughts were
+      busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also and the Herr Doktor
+      would meet her. But that was foolish! There were other resorts besides
+      Semmering, and in the little villa to which they went there would be no
+      Americans. It was childish to worry about a girl whose back and profile
+      only she had seen. Also profiles were deceptive; there was the matter of
+      the ears. Marie's ears were small and set close to her head. If the
+      American Fraulein's ears stuck out or her face were only short and wide!
+      But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once swiftly into the
+      compartment. She was quite lovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of stretching and
+      yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not speak to the girl; Marie
+      noted that with some comfort. But shortly after she saw him conversing
+      easily with a male member of the party. Her heart sank again. Life was
+      moving very fast for Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered his own
+      cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels together, a German
+      custom he had picked up. The girl was impressed; Marie saw that. When they
+      drew into the station at Semmering Stewart helped the American party off
+      first and then came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than the little
+      Austrian's would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape attention, once
+      they were out of the train and moving toward the gate of the station. He
+      stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the hand-luggage and picked it
+      up again, as though it weighed heavily, whereas it was both small and
+      light. He loitered through the gate and paused to exchange a word with the
+      gateman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh and well up
+      the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated side by side in a
+      straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a robe over their knees, and
+      a noisy driver high above them on the driving-seat. Stewart spoke to her
+      then, the first time for half an hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered wide over
+      the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens, hidden from the
+      roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery separated by valleys. One
+      might live in one part of Semmering for a month and never suspect the
+      existence of other parts, or wander over steep roads and paths for days
+      and never pass twice over the same one. The Herr Doktor might not see the
+      American girl again&mdash;and if he did! Did he not see American girls
+      wherever he went?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing. Below in
+      the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue shadows, of cows
+      with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of houses with dark faces
+      that opened an eye of lamplight as one looked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Across the valley and far above&mdash;Marie pointed without words. Her
+      small heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it, steeper,
+      more beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset hue of rose was
+      the Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation as he gazed with her. He
+      reached over and covered both her hands with his large one under the robe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of ecstasy, leaned
+      back and watched the mountain; its crown faded from rose to gold, from
+      gold to purple with a thread of black. There was a shadow on the side that
+      looked like a cross. Marie stopped the sleigh at a wayside shrine, and
+      getting out knelt to say a prayer for the travelers who had died on the
+      Rax. They had taken a room at a small villa where board was cheap, and
+      where the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier sort from Bavaria.
+      Both the season and the modest character of the establishment promised
+      them quiet and seclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury. It clung
+      to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor, looked out from the
+      back of the building over the valley, which fell away almost sheer from
+      beneath their windows. A tiny balcony outside, with access to it by a door
+      from the bedroom, looked far down on the tops of tall pines. It made Marie
+      dizzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be unpacked and
+      the Herr Doktor's things put away, his shoes in rows, as he liked them,
+      and his shaving materials laid out on the washstand. Then there was a new
+      dress to put on, that she might do him credit at supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and the draft
+      under the balcony door; the light was wrong for shaving. But the truth
+      came out at last and found Marie not unprepared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fact is,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'm not going to eat with you to-night, dear. I'm
+      going to the hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With the Americans?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother&mdash;with the
+      young man you saw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to take off
+      the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just fastened and
+      fighting back tears as she struggled with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not sulking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you change your clothes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish to wear
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had walked for
+      five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel he found the party
+      waiting for him, the women in evening gowns. The girl, whose name was
+      Anita, was bewitching in pale green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind once more&mdash;a
+      perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation, enlivened by a bit of sweet
+      champagne, an hour or two on the terrace afterward with the women in furs,
+      and stars making a jeweled crown for the Rax.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and opening the
+      door of the room found her missing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the balcony
+      and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold, but she was wise
+      with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didst thou have a fine evening?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonderful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good, little Marie!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The card in the American Doctors' Club brought a response finally. It was
+      just in time. Harmony's funds were low, and the Frau Professor Bergmeister
+      had gone to St. Moritz for the winter. She regretted the English lessons,
+      but there were always English at St. Moritz and it cost nothing to talk
+      with them. Before she left she made Harmony a present. &ldquo;For Christmas,&rdquo;
+       she explained. It was a glass pin-tray, decorated beneath with labels from
+      the Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a picture of the Emperor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east
+      wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old garden
+      gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it. It flew back
+      violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in process of egress down the
+      walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer, clad as usual in the best broadcloth
+      and wearing her old sable cape, made over according to her oldest
+      daughter's ideas into a staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the path now
+      and Mrs. Boyer was gasping for breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm so sorry!&rdquo; Harmony exclaimed. &ldquo;It was stupid of me; but the wind&mdash;Is
+      this your muff?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to extract
+      a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down the broadcloth.
+      Harmony stood apologetically by. It is explanatory of Mrs. Boyer's face,
+      attitude, and costume that the girl addressed her in English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I backed in,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;So few people come, and no Americans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this humble
+      apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It really is no matter,&rdquo; she said, still coolly but with indications of
+      thawing. &ldquo;I am only glad it did not strike my nose. I dare say it would
+      have, but I was looking up to see if it were going to snow.&rdquo; Here she saw
+      the violin case and became almost affable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a card in the Doctors' Club, and I called&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Miss Wells. The card is mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin lessons
+      and I offered to come. The mother is very busy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can talk
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the tea. She
+      had had no good tea since she had left England, and was inclined to
+      suspect all of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead, explaining
+      this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door, here an ancient bit of
+      furniture not considered worthy of salvage, there a closed and locked
+      room, home of ghosts and legends. To Harmony this elderly woman, climbing
+      slowly behind her, was a bit of home. There had been many such in her
+      life; women no longer young, friends of her mother's who were friends of
+      hers; women to whom she had been wont to pay the courtesy of a potted
+      hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas or a bit of custard during an
+      illness. She had missed them all cruelly, as she had missed many things&mdash;her
+      mother, her church, her small gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau
+      Professor Bergmeister might allay her longing for these comfortable,
+      middle-aged, placid-eyed friends of hers. But the Frau Professor
+      Bergmeister had proved to be a frivolous and garrulous old woman, who
+      substituted ease for comfort, and who burned a candle on the name-day of
+      her first husband while her second was safely out of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way up the
+      stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily engaged
+      in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples Harmony had had
+      about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to get them safely out of
+      the place and to the hospital. So Peter was polishing the horns. Harmony
+      had not expected to find him home, and paused, rather startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I didn't know you were home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter spoke without turning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try to bear up under it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'm home and hungry, sweetheart!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter, please!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in the salon
+      and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But that keen-eyed lady
+      had known him before he turned, had taken in the domesticity of the scene
+      and Peter's part in it, and had drawn the swift conclusion of the pure of
+      heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll come again,&rdquo; she said hurriedly. &ldquo;I&mdash;I must really get home.
+      Dr. Boyer will be there, and wondering&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Boyer!&rdquo; Peter knew her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn't it? How unexpected to find you here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I live here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I surmised.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three of us,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;You know Anna Gates, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid not. Really I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost damning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken me in as
+      a boarder. Please sit down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly puzzled at
+      Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two single women and
+      one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative strangers, setting up
+      housekeeping together had never occurred to her. Many a single woman whom
+      she knew at home took a gentleman into the house as a roomer, and
+      thereafter referred to him as &ldquo;he&rdquo; and spent hours airing the curtains of
+      smoke and even, as &ldquo;he&rdquo; became a member of the family, in sewing on his
+      buttons. There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement; merely a
+      concession to economic pressure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but bustling
+      about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her cheeks flushed with
+      excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau Professor had gone, the
+      prospect of a music pupil meant everything. An American child, too! Fond
+      as Harmony was of children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who walked
+      the parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and fixed eyes
+      through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted her. They were
+      never alone, those Austrian children&mdash;always under surveillance,
+      always restrained, always prepared to kiss the hand of whatever relative
+      might be near and to take themselves of to anywhere so it were somewhere
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American child,&rdquo; said
+      Harmony, bringing in the tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the American
+      child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked most
+      irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult situation
+      with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea was good;
+      that was one thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the concession of
+      putting it on a chair as savoring too much of acceptance if not approval,
+      and sipped her tea out of a spoon as becomes a tea-lover. Peter, who
+      loathed tea, lounged about the room, clearly in the way, but fearful to
+      leave Harmony alone with her. She was quite likely, at the first
+      opportunity, to read her a lesson on the conventions, if nothing worse; to
+      upset the delicate balance of the little household he was guarding. So he
+      stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story, while Harmony
+      toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the lessons. None
+      came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and put down her cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was very refreshing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Where shall I find the street-car?
+      I walked out, but it is late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take you to the car.&rdquo; Peter picked up his old hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the conductors
+      double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how can they when it is
+      the wrong car?&rdquo; She bowed to Harmony without shaking hands. &ldquo;Thank you for
+      the tea. It was really good. Where do you get it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Not a word about the lessons or the American child!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said something about my card in the Doctors' Club&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something wistful in the girl's eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand and her
+      voice was not so hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social visit and
+      we'll not spoil it with business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really think the boy's mother must attend to that herself. But I shall
+      tell her where to find you, and&rdquo;&mdash;here she glanced at Peter&mdash;&ldquo;all
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said Harmony gratefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and through
+      the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind them he turned
+      and faced her:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The result was
+      a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She drew her ample
+      proportions into a dignity that was almost majesty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without
+      foundation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad of that.&rdquo; There was no conviction in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony's sake, &ldquo;I
+      suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is not a young
+      woman by any means, and she takes very good care of Miss Wells. There were
+      reasons why this seemed the best thing to do. Miss Wells was alone and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a Dr. Gates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. If you will come back and wait she'll be along very soon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced that there
+      might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the situation was
+      anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in that she had lost the
+      anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a piece of her mind. She walked along
+      beside him without speaking until they reached the street-car line. Then
+      she turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You called her&mdash;you spoke to her very affectionately, young man,&rdquo;
+       she accused him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some perversion
+      of humor seized him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Mrs. Boyer,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that was in jest purely. Besides, I did
+      not know that you were there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged American
+      womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and settled its
+      broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the cane seat. It was
+      outraged American womanhood that flung open the door of Marie Jedlicka's
+      flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka's sitting room confronted her
+      husband as he read a month-old newspaper from home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?&rdquo; she demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned to meet
+      domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good humor, or at the
+      most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Gates&mdash;Anna Gates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I don't know
+      their names.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where does Peter Byrne live?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything to eat or
+      do we sup of Peter Byrne?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom of Marie
+      Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of the beds with the
+      crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing about rooms. There was no
+      change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie's tiny
+      slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial
+      house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it
+      hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that
+      soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that
+      there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential
+      qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not
+      people? That when grandfather's wraith is seen in his old armchair it is
+      the chair that produces it, while grandfather himself serenely haunts the
+      shades of some vast wilderness of departed spirits?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was
+      exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where the most
+      orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no attraction whatever in the
+      thing they are asked to believe. Mrs. Boyer, who would have regarded it as
+      heterodox to substitute any other instrument for the harp of her
+      expectation, tied on her gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka's mirror, and
+      thought of Harmony and of the girls at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less shocked than
+      she had expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not your affair or mine,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It's Byrne's business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of the girl!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even if you are right it's rather late, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could tell him what you think of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living with a
+      representative male had never taught his wife the reserves among members
+      of the sex masculine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might, but I don't intend to,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And if you listen to me you'll
+      keep the thing to yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils,&rdquo; snapped Mrs.
+      Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand painful
+      steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked soul. The soul was
+      Harmony's; the foot&mdash;was it not encased at that moment in Mrs.
+      Boyer's comfortable house shoes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on her car,
+      went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat, and with the
+      sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too indignant to be cold. He
+      ran up the staircase, hearing on all sides the creaking and banging with
+      which the old house resented a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria
+      Theresa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her face
+      hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when he entered.
+      Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She quivered under it and
+      he took it away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little,&rdquo; very smothered. &ldquo;Just dis-disappointment. Don't mind me,
+      Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean about the pupil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now more than
+      ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had stained her cheek. She
+      looked rather hectic, very lovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did she change so when she saw you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might have
+      said, safe things. Not one came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&mdash;she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry,&rdquo; he said gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Anna?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters,&rdquo; he added
+      hastily. &ldquo;I'll make Anna go to her and explain. It's her infernal jumping
+      to a conclusion that makes me crazy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will talk, Peter. I am frightened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take Anna to-night and we'll go to Boyer's. I'll make that woman get
+      down on her knees to you. I'll&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll make bad very much worse,&rdquo; said Harmony dejectedly. &ldquo;When a thing
+      has to be explained it does no good to explain it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As in the
+      dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the compelling influence of
+      her nearness. He wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life
+      before, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bid defiance to
+      evil tongues. He was afraid of himself. To gain a moment he put a chair
+      between them and stood, strong hands gripping its back, looking down at
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one thing we could do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it&mdash;it might not
+      be so bad for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course, but&mdash;not
+      that way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even if I wish it very much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are thinking of my future&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you care a
+      little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are lonely and I am the
+      only person you see much, so you think you want to marry me. You don't
+      really. You want to help me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny his
+      altruism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer, compared
+      with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the compelling motive
+      after all, his need of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be a rotten match for you,&rdquo; he agreed. &ldquo;I only thought, perhaps&mdash;You
+      are right, of course; you ought not to marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what about you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought not, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony rose, smiling a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then that's settled. And for goodness' sake, Peter, stop proposing to me
+      every time things go wrong.&rdquo; Her voice changed, grew grave and older, much
+      older than Peter's. &ldquo;We must not marry, either of us, Peter. Anna is
+      right. There might be an excuse if we were very much in love: but we are
+      not. And loneliness is not a reason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very lonely,&rdquo; said Peter wistfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning and
+      approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere of mystery
+      that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a good night and
+      having taken the morning's medicine without argument, had been allowed up
+      in a roller chair. It struck Peter with a pang that the boy looked more
+      frail day by day, more transparent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have brought you,&rdquo; said Peter gravely, &ldquo;the cod-liver oil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then guess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dad's letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've just had one. Don't be a piggy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Animal, vegetable, or mineral?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vegetable,&rdquo; said Peter shamelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soft or hard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soft.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be vegetable;
+      they could hardly be soft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A kitten?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A kitten is not vegetable, James.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!&rdquo; For by this time Harmony was his
+      very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which consisted of Nurse
+      Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna and Peter, and of course the
+      sentry, who did not know that he belonged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gelatin, to be sure,&rdquo; replied Peter, and produced the horns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row of beds,
+      its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if to add a touch of
+      completeness the sentry outside, peering in, saw the wheeled chair with
+      its occupant, and celebrated this advance along the road to recovery by
+      placing on the window-ledge a wooden replica of himself, bayonet and all,
+      carved from a bit of cigar box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody is very nice to me,&rdquo; said Jimmy contentedly. &ldquo;When my father
+      comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who are kind to me.
+      There was a woman on the ship&mdash;What is bulging your pocket, Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My handkerchief.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood up
+      before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward watched joyously, while
+      from pocket after pocket of Peter's old gray suit came Jimmy's salvage&mdash;two
+      nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout colonel of
+      hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier waiting to go
+      through the various salutations due his rank before assisting him. A gala
+      day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the little mountain town
+      with only a name on the cross at its head, and if one did not notice that
+      the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands soon tired of playing and
+      lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was much inured to death and
+      lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her almost fiercely as she
+      lifted him back from the chair into the smooth white bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of the deer
+      beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping guard.
+      As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet beckoning
+      to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the sentinel on guard
+      and tiptoed down the room. Just outside, round a corner, was the Dozent's
+      laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where he slept, where on a stand
+      was the photograph of the lady he would marry when he had become a
+      professor and required no one's consent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which kept the
+      boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with Austrian intrigue had
+      made him invaluable. He it was who had originated the idea of making Jimmy
+      responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly Trager quarreling
+      over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or brawling over his soup
+      with another patient, was likely to be hailed in a thin soprano, and to
+      stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in mixed English and German,
+      restored the decorum of the ward. They were a quarrelsome lot, the
+      convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling disputes and awarding
+      decisions that he slept almost all night. This was as it should be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white coat,
+      stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous. He held out a
+      letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This has come for the child,&rdquo; he said in quite good English. He was
+      obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans
+      who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with which
+      some day he would marry. He liked the English language; he liked Americans
+      because they learned quickly. He held out an envelope with a black border
+      and Peter took it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From Paris!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Who in the world&mdash;I suppose I'd better open
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I thought. It appears a letter of&mdash;how you say it? Ah, yes,
+      condolence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave it open
+      to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent read
+      it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of sugar.
+      Peter's face was very sober.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a baby&mdash;went
+      on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her, which is a good
+      thing. She seems to have been a bad lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She comes to take him away. That is impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course it is impossible,&rdquo; said Peter savagely. &ldquo;She's not going to see
+      the child if I can help it. She left because&mdash;she's the boy's mother,
+      but that's the best you can say of her. This letter&mdash;Well, you've
+      read it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is as a stranger to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely. She will come in mourning&mdash;look at that black border&mdash;and
+      tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the type.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched, as
+      does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the gushing letter in his
+      hand and thought fiercely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is on her way here,&rdquo; said the Dozent. &ldquo;That is bad. Paris to Wien is
+      two days and a night. She may hourly arrive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might send him away&mdash;to another hospital.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had I a home&mdash;&rdquo; he said, and glanced through the door to the
+      portrait on the stand. &ldquo;It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for
+      a time. In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a
+      fit person the boy could be given to her. It is, of course, an affair of
+      police.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
+      imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail. He read
+      the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy's mother, and
+      failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy slept. A burly convalescent,
+      with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general appearance of an
+      assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up the blanket round
+      the small shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day,&rdquo; said the
+      Dozent. &ldquo;That gives us a few hours. She will go to the police, and
+      to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the mean time,&rdquo; Peter replied, &ldquo;I'll try to think of something. If I
+      thought she could be warned and would leave him here&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with him
+      through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to be there for
+      carnival, and the boy will die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read it again
+      in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from it. It spoke of the
+      dead father coldly, and the father had been the boy's idol. No good woman
+      could have been so heartless. It offered the boy a seat in one of the
+      least reputable of the Paris theaters to hear his mother sing. And in the
+      envelope, overlooked before, Peter found a cutting from a French
+      newspaper, a picture of the music-hall type that made him groan. It was
+      indorsed &ldquo;Mamma.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in order,
+      working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel&mdash;all in order
+      but Peter's room. That was to have a special cleaning later. Next, still
+      with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours with her violin, standing
+      very close to the stove to save fuel and keep her fingers warm. She played
+      well that morning: even her own critical ears were satisfied, and the
+      Portier, repairing a window lock in an empty room below, was entranced. He
+      sat on the window sill in the biting cold and listened. Many music
+      students had lived in the apartment with the great salon; there had been
+      much music of one sort and another, but none like this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She tears my heart from my bosom,&rdquo; muttered the Portier, sighing, and
+      almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter's room. She felt very tender
+      toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer's visit had died away,
+      but there remained a clear vision of Peter standing behind the chair and
+      offering himself humbly in marriage, so that a bad situation might be made
+      better. And as with a man tenderness expresses itself in the giving of
+      gifts, so with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony cleaned Peter's
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was really rather tidy. Peter's few belongings did not spread to any
+      extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the rudiments of order.
+      Harmony took the covers from washstand and dressing table and washed and
+      ironed them. She cleaned Peter's worn brushes and brought a pincushion of
+      her own for his one extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own steamer
+      rug and folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove in the
+      room; it had been Harmony's room once, and she knew to the full how cold
+      it could be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for the inner.
+      She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up, when Anna came home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came somberly
+      back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was making fast that
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Harry,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm going to take a bite and hurry off. Don't
+      bother, I'll attend to myself.&rdquo; She stuffed the letter in her belt and got
+      a plate from a shelf. &ldquo;How pretty you look with your head tied up! If
+      stupid Peter saw you now he would fall in love with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt rather better
+      after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off, was busy over the
+      brick stove. There was nothing said for a moment. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am out of patience with Peter,&rdquo; said Anna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because he hasn't fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Anna!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it's superhuman of
+      Peter. I wonder&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I'll not tell you what I wonder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna's frank speech, did not insist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna's thoughts
+      wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt and back again to
+      Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been suspicious of Peter. From
+      her dozen years of advantage in age and experience she looked down on
+      Peter's thirty years of youth, and thought she knew something that Peter
+      himself did not suspect. Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his
+      heart-searching for him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony
+      and did not himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup,
+      revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and grace, a
+      thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility she and Peter had
+      assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for her letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had rather bad news,&rdquo; she said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. My father&mdash;did you know I have a father?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You hadn't spoken of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never do. As a father he hasn't amounted to much. But he's very ill,
+      and&mdash;I 've a conscience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony turned a startled face to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not going back to America?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and do go
+      I'll find some one to take my place. Don't worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came in, and
+      there was no time to discuss Peter's new complication with her. Harmony
+      and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent. Anna's unfortunate comment
+      about Peter had made her constrained. After the meal Peter, pipe in mouth,
+      carried the dishes to the kitchen, and there it was that he gave her the
+      letter. What Peter's slower mind had been a perceptible time in grasping
+      Harmony comprehended at once&mdash;and not only the situation, but its
+      solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let her have him!&rdquo; she said, putting down the letter. &ldquo;Bring him
+      here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so obvious
+      was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and estrays, banded
+      together against a common poverty, a common loneliness, should share
+      without question whatever was theirs to divide. Peter and Anna gave
+      cheerfully of their substance, Harmony of her labor, that a small boy
+      should be saved a tragic knowledge until he was well enough to bear it, or
+      until, if God so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind. Thus
+      it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials of the
+      Votivkirche showed nine o'clock, he did not notice a cab that halted
+      across the street from the hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of him,
+      carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and insisting
+      on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to say that he
+      had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that it was a short
+      stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was undoubtedly clothing
+      going to the laundry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps&mdash;it is just possible&mdash;the sentry had his suspicions. It
+      is undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with Peter's arm
+      close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going through
+      the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing toward the
+      carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg sulked
+      behind walls of mist. From the little balcony of the Pension Waldheim one
+      looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there by islands that
+      were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were evergreen trees. The
+      roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the horses steamed and
+      sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the barking of a dog
+      loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be seen. Children cried
+      and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain
+      with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain
+      clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the slip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close the heavy
+      wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the room was sticky
+      and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined to the house, grew
+      irritable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender tenure
+      she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither speech nor thought.
+      And the little Marie's love for Stewart, grown to be a part of her, was
+      largely maternal. She held him by mothering him, by keeping him
+      comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have
+      brought him to her in chains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement; he
+      resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her unusual
+      leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire, and
+      stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious
+      thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the night of the second day the weather changed. Marie, awakening
+      early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the door carefully behind
+      her. A new world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering branches, of
+      white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe was become a garment.
+      And from behind the villa came the cheerful sound of sleigh-bells, of
+      horses' feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily along frozen roads.
+      Even the barking of the dog in the next yard had ceased rumbling and
+      become sharp staccato.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The balcony extended round the corner of the house. Marie, eagerly
+      discovering her new world, peered about, and seeing no one near ventured
+      so far. The road was in view, and a small girl on ski was struggling to
+      prevent a collision between two plump feet. Even as Marie saw her the
+      inevitable happened and she went headlong into a drift. A governess who
+      had been kneeling before a shrine by the road hastily crossed herself and
+      ran to the rescue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a marvelous morning, a day of days. The governess and the child
+      went on out of vision. Marie stood still, looking at the shrine. A drift
+      had piled about its foot, where the governess had placed a bunch of Alpine
+      flowers. Down on her knees on the balcony went the little Marie,
+      regardless of the snow, and prayed to the shrine of the Virgin below&mdash;for
+      what? For forgiveness? For a better life? Not at all. She prayed that the
+      heels of the American girl would keep her in out of the snow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prayer of the wicked availeth nothing; even the godly at times must
+      suffer disappointment. And when one prays of heels, who can know of the
+      yearning back of the praying? Marie, rising and dusting her chilled knees,
+      saw the party of Americans on the road, clad in stout boots and swinging
+      along gayly. Marie shrugged her shoulders resignedly. She should have gone
+      to the shrine itself; a balcony was not a holy place. But one thing she
+      determined&mdash;the Americans went toward the Sonnwendstein. She would
+      advise against the Sonnwendstein for that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie's day of days had begun wrong after all. For Stewart rose with the
+      Sonnwendstein in his mind, and no suggestion of Marie's that in another
+      day a path would be broken had any effect on him. He was eager to be off,
+      committed the extravagance of ordering an egg apiece for breakfast, and
+      finally proclaimed that if Marie feared the climb he would go alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie made many delays: she dressed slowly, and must run back to see if
+      the balcony door was securely closed. At a little shop where they stopped
+      to buy mountain sticks she must purchase postcards and send them at once.
+      Stewart was fairly patient: air and exercise were having their effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was eleven o'clock when, having crossed the valley, they commenced to
+      mount the slope of the Sonnwendstein. The climb was easy; the road wound
+      back and forward on itself so that one ascended with hardly an effort.
+      Stewart gave Marie a hand here and there, and even paused to let her sit
+      on a boulder and rest. The snow was not heavy; he showed her the
+      footprints of a party that had gone ahead, and to amuse her tried to count
+      the number of people. When he found it was five he grew thoughtful. There
+      were five in Anita's party. Thanks to Marie's delays they met the
+      Americans coming down. The meeting was a short one: the party went on
+      down, gayly talking. Marie and Stewart climbed silently. Marie's day was
+      spoiled; Stewart had promised to dine at the hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the view at the tourist house did not restore Marie's fallen spirits.
+      What were the Vienna plain and the Styrian Alps to her, with this
+      impatient and frowning man beside her consulting his watch and computing
+      the time until he might see the American again? What was prayer, if this
+      were its answer?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They descended rapidly, Stewart always in the lead and setting a pace that
+      Marie struggled in vain to meet. To her tentative and breathless remarks
+      he made brief answer, and only once in all that time did he volunteer a
+      remark. They had reached the Hotel Erzherzog in the valley. The hotel was
+      still closed, and Marie, panting, sat down on an edge of the terrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have been very foolish,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Being seen together like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why? Could you not walk with any woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not that,&rdquo; said Stewart hastily. &ldquo;I suppose once does not matter.
+      But we can't be seen together all the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie turned white. The time had gone by when an incident of the sort
+      could have been met with scorn or with threats; things had changed for
+      Marie Jedlicka since the day Peter had refused to introduce her to
+      Harmony. Then it had been vanity; now it was life itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you mean,&rdquo; she said with pale lips, &ldquo;is that we must not be seen
+      together at all. Must I&mdash;do you wish me to remain a prisoner while
+      you&mdash;&rdquo; she choked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven's sake,&rdquo; he broke out brutally, &ldquo;don't make a scene. There are
+      men cutting ice over there. Of course you are not a prisoner. You may go
+      where you like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie rose and picked up her muff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie's sordid little tragedy played itself out in Semmering. Stewart
+      neglected her almost completely; he took fewer and fewer meals at the
+      villa. In two weeks he spent one evening with the girl, and was so
+      irritable that she went to bed crying. The little mountain resort was
+      filling up; there were more and more Americans. Christmas was drawing near
+      and a dozen or so American doctors came up, bringing their families for
+      the holidays. It was difficult to enter a shop without encountering some
+      of them. To add to the difficulty, the party at the hotel, finding it
+      crowded there, decided to go into a pension and suggested moving to the
+      Waldheim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart himself was wretchedly uncomfortable. Marie's tragedy was his
+      predicament. He disliked himself very cordially, loathing himself and his
+      situation with the new-born humility of the lover. For Stewart was in love
+      for the first time in his life. Marie knew it. She had not lived with him
+      for months without knowing his every thought, every mood. She grew bitter
+      and hard those days, sitting alone by the green stove in the Pension
+      Waldheim, or leaning, elbows on the rail, looking from the balcony over
+      the valley far below. Bitter and hard, that is, during his absences; he
+      had but to enter the room and her rage died, to be replaced with yearning
+      and little, shy, tentative advances that he only tolerated. Wild thoughts
+      came to Marie, especially at night, when the stars made a crown over the
+      Rax, and in the hotel an orchestra played, while people dined and laughed
+      and loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She grew obstinate, too. When in his desperation Stewart suggested that
+      they go back to Vienna she openly scoffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;That you may come back here to her, leaving me
+      there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear girl,&rdquo; he flung back exasperated, &ldquo;this affair was not a
+      permanent one. You knew that at the start.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have taken me away from my work. I have two months' vacation. It is
+      but one month.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go back and let me pay&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In pursuance of the plan to leave the hotel the American party came to see
+      the Waldheim, and catastrophe almost ensued. Luckily Marie was on the
+      balcony when the landlady flung open the door, and announced it as
+      Stewart's apartment. But Stewart had a bad five minutes and took it out,
+      manlike, on the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart had another reason for not wishing to leave Semmering. Anita was
+      beautiful, a bit of a coquette, too; as are most pretty women. And Stewart
+      was not alone in his devotion. A member of the party, a New Yorker named
+      Adam, was much in love with the girl and indifferent who knew it. Stewart
+      detested him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his despair Stewart wrote to Peter Byrne. It was characteristic of
+      Peter that, however indifferent people might be in prosperity, they always
+      turned to him in trouble. Stewart's letter concluded:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have made out a poor case for myself; but I'm in a hole, as you can
+      see. I would like to chuck everything here and sail for home with these
+      people who go in January. But, confound it, Byrne, what am I to do with
+      Marie? And that brings me to what I 've been wanting to say all along, and
+      haven't had the courage to. Marie likes you and you rather liked her,
+      didn't you? You could talk her into reason if anybody could. Now that you
+      know how things are, can't you come up over Sunday? It's asking a lot, and
+      I know it; but things are pretty bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter received the letter on the morning of the day before Christmas. He
+      read it several times and, recalling the look he had seen more than once
+      in Marie Jedlicka's eyes, he knew that things were very bad, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter was a man of family in those days, and Christmas is a family
+      festival not to be lightly ignored. He wired to Stewart that he would come
+      up as soon as possible after Christmas. Then, because of the look in
+      Marie's eyes and because he feared for her a sad Christmas, full of
+      heartaches and God knows what loneliness, he bought her a most hideous
+      brooch, which he thought admirable in every way and highly ornamental and
+      which he could not afford at all. This he mailed, with a cheery greeting,
+      and feeling happier and much poorer made his way homeward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with the
+      great chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with cranberry eyes
+      for supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree gleaming with candles on
+      the stand, and beside the stand, in a huge chair, Jimmy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had been shopping
+      and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless, with the shops full
+      of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly overburdened. There had been
+      anxieties, too, such as the pig's head, which must be done a certain way,
+      and Jimmy, who must be left with the Portier's wife as nurse while all of
+      them went to the hospital. The house revolved around Jimmy now, Jimmy, who
+      seemed the better for the moving, and whose mother as yet had failed to
+      materialize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as the
+      early twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry kept guard
+      and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground men wandered about,
+      smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving to keep warm,
+      offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, with here and there
+      an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home. The hospital was
+      always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she found it harrowing.
+      Its very size shocked her, that there should be so much suffering, so much
+      that was appalling, frightful, insupportable. Peter felt her quiver under
+      his hand. A hospital in festivity is very affecting. It smiles through its
+      tears. And in every assemblage there are sharply defined lines of
+      difference. There are those who are going home soon, God willing; there
+      are those who will go home some time after long days and longer nights.
+      And there are those who will never go home and who know it. And because of
+      this the ones who are never going home are most festively clad, as if, by
+      way of compensation, the nurses mean to give them all future Christmasses
+      in one. They receive an extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,&mdash;and
+      they are not the less grateful because they understand. And when
+      everything is over they lay away in the bedside stand the gloves they will
+      never wear, and divide the extra orange with a less fortunate one who is
+      almost recovered. Their last Christmas is past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How beautiful the tree was!&rdquo; they say. Or, &ldquo;Did you hear how the children
+      sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think&mdash;of angels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,
+      and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was to
+      play. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon; no
+      one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the
+      nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.
+      Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and
+      wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
+      imposing audience was the result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats
+      rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the roof.
+      In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other illumination
+      in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the rows of hopeful,
+      hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white gowns, the soft
+      rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with the red beard
+      stepped out and began to read an address&mdash;all caught Harmony by the
+      throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt rather than heard
+      her soft sob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through Harmony's
+      eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away, leaving him
+      quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of humanity that he
+      had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be counted. Now, once more,
+      Peter was back in the early days, when a heart was not a pump, but a thing
+      that ached or thrilled or struggled, that loved or hated or yearned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning
+      festivity into gloom. It played Handel's &ldquo;Largo&rdquo;; it threw its whole soul
+      into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor place, that
+      Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep vibration of
+      the cello. Harmony fidgeted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How terrible!&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;To turn their Christmas-Eve into mourning!
+      Stop them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop a German orchestra?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed recitations,
+      gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the patients. Then&mdash;Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous, she
+      knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the candles
+      burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a white coat
+      asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to her
+      accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at first
+      timidly, then lustily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the applause.
+      Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought Peter's, and finding
+      them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as softly the
+      others sang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,&rdquo;&mdash;they sang, with upturned eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in which his
+      poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a Christmas-Eve
+      in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a girl-woman, of a still and
+      holy night, of a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nur das traute, hoch heilige Paar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar Schlaf'
+      in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh',&rdquo; they sang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room, which had
+      been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with a fire
+      all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony brought
+      her small puzzles and together they solved them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall it be a steak to-night?&rdquo; thus Harmony humbly. &ldquo;Or chops?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With tomato sauce?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Peter allows, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fish,&rdquo; he would decide. &ldquo;Fish with egg dressing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement,
+      but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many and bitter were the
+      battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the
+      litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully calculated
+      expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on which he had
+      set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as a luxury. There
+      was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for Peter was spelling
+      itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those days. He resented
+      anything that took him from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was failing.
+      He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones be bygones
+      and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's great prop. What
+      would he do should she decide to go home? He had built his house on the
+      sand, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.
+      Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote letters of marvelous
+      adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured
+      them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of
+      his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. &ldquo;Dad&rdquo; was
+      already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes he
+      called Peter &ldquo;Dad.&rdquo; At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an agony
+      of tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
+      Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the
+      privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All day
+      he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for the
+      tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming only,
+      and sternly forbidden to eat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, with a
+      collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a pair
+      of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage was on his
+      knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake with pink
+      icing. The Portier's gift was a stealthy one, while his wife was having
+      coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of Christmas does
+      strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was roistering in a
+      beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the Portier's wife,
+      puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that only the initiated
+      could open, and when one succeeded at last there was a picture of the
+      Christ-Child within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young McLean came to call that evening&mdash;came to call and remained to
+      worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor had come.
+      McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, was a
+      comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments since the
+      day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the hallmark of respectability on the
+      household, to restore it to something it had lost or had never had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna put Jimmy
+      to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was extinguishing the
+      dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean was at the piano, thrumming
+      softly. Peter, turning round suddenly, surprised an expression on the
+      younger man's face that startled him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For that one night Harmony had laid aside her mourning, and wore white,
+      soft white, tucked in at the neck, short-sleeved, trailing. Peter had
+      never seen her in white before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were always
+      alert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night he was
+      unusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp and watched the
+      two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or that, the girl bending
+      over a string of her violin. Anna came in and sat down near him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boy is quite fascinated,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;Watch his eyes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a nice boy.&rdquo; This from Peter, as if he argued with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As men go!&rdquo; This was a challenge Peter was usually quick to accept. That
+      night he only smiled. &ldquo;It would be a good thing for her: his people are
+      wealthy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem. Eminently
+      it would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in his well-made
+      evening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language of music, who was almost
+      speechless over her playing, and who looked up at her with eyes in which
+      admiration was not unmixed with adoration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the room and
+      took to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each time as he passed the
+      door he tried not to glance in; each time he paused involuntarily.
+      Jealousy had her will of him that night, jealousy, when he had never
+      acknowledged even to himself how much the girl was to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but that
+      night he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the doors. Peter came
+      in and sat with him in the dark, going over now and then to cover him, or
+      to give him a drink, or to pick up the cage of mice which Jimmy insisted
+      on having beside him and which constantly slipped off on to the floor.
+      After a time Peter lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on a cork
+      floating in a saucer of lard oil, and set it on the bedside table. Then
+      round it he arranged Jimmy's treasures, the deer antlers, the cage of
+      mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat in the
+      room, his dead pipe in his teeth, and thought of many things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very late when young McLean left. The two had played until they
+      stopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to bed. From
+      Jimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been awfully good to me,&rdquo; McLean said as he finally rose to go.
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I want you to know that I'll never forget this evening, never.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has been splendid, hasn't it? Since little Scatchy left there has been
+      no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for some one to talk
+      music to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lonely! Poor Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you will let me come back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will I, indeed! I&mdash;I'll be grateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How soon would be proper? I dare say to-morrow you'll be busy&mdash;Christmas
+      and all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean you would like to come to-morrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If old Peter wouldn't be fussed. He might think&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter always wants every one to be happy. So if you really care&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I'll not bore you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How&mdash;about what time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the afternoon would be pleasant, I think. And then Jimmy can listen.
+      He loves music.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean, having found his fur-lined coat, got into it as slowly as
+      possible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in all the
+      dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even then he
+      hesitated, lingered, loath to break up this little world of two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You play wonderfully,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If only something comes of it! It's curious, isn't it, when you think of
+      it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and both of us working
+      our heads off for something that may never pan out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not until
+      after young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was almost word for word
+      what Peter had said to her in the coffee-house the night they met. She
+      thought it very curious, the coincidence, and pondered it, being ignorant
+      of the fact that it is always a matter for wonder when the man meets the
+      woman, no matter where. Nothing is less curious, more inevitable, more
+      amazing. &ldquo;You and I,&rdquo; forsooth, said Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You and I,&rdquo; cried young McLean!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Quite suddenly Peter's house, built on the sand, collapsed. The shock came
+      on Christmas-Day, after young McLean, now frankly infatuated, had been
+      driven home by Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter did it after his own fashion. Harmony, with unflagging enthusiasm,
+      was looking tired. Suggestions to this effect rolled off McLean's back
+      like rain off a roof. Finally Peter gathered up the fur-lined coat, the
+      velours hat, gloves, and stick, and placed them on the piano in front of
+      the younger man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry you must go,&rdquo; said Peter calmly, &ldquo;but, as you say, Miss Wells
+      is tired and there is supper to be eaten. Don't let me hurry you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was at the door as McLean, laughing and protesting, went out.
+      He brought a cablegram for Anna. Peter took it to her door and waited
+      uneasily while she read it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an urgent summons home; the old father was very low. He was calling
+      for her, and a few days or week' would see the end. There were things that
+      must be looked after. The need of her was imperative. With the death the
+      old man's pension would cease and Anna was the bread-winner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna held the paper out to Peter and sat down. Her nervous strength seemed
+      to have deserted her. All at once she was a stricken, elderly woman, with
+      hope wiped out of her face and something nearer resentment than grief in
+      its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has come, Peter,&rdquo; she said dully. &ldquo;I always knew it couldn't last.
+      They've always hung about my neck, and now&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think you must go? Isn't there some way? If things are so bad you
+      could hardly get there in time, and&mdash;you must think of yourself a
+      little, Anna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not thinking of anything else. Peter, I'm an uncommonly selfish
+      woman, but I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite without warning she burst out crying, unlovely, audible weeping that
+      shook her narrow shoulders. Harmony heard the sound and joined them. After
+      a look at Anna she sat down beside her and put a white arm over her
+      shoulders. She did not try to speak. Anna's noisy grief subsided as
+      suddenly as it came. She patted Harmony's hand in mute acknowledgment and
+      dried her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not grieving, child,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I'm only realizing what a selfish
+      old maid I am. I'm crying because I'm a disappointment to myself. Harry,
+      I'm going back to America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that, after hours of discussion, was where they ended. Anna must go at
+      once. Peter must keep the apartment, having Jimmy to look after and to
+      hide. What was a frightful dilemma to him and to Harmony Anna took rather
+      lightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll find some one else to take my place,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If I had a day I
+      could find a dozen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And in the interval?&rdquo; Harmony asked, without looking at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The interval! Tut! Peter is your brother, to all intents and purposes.
+      And if you are thinking of scandal-mongers, who will know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Having determined to go, no arguments moved Anna, nor could either of the
+      two think of anything to urge beyond a situation she refused to see, or
+      rather a situation she refused to acknowledge. She was not as comfortable
+      as she pretended. During all that long night, while snow sifted down into
+      the ugly yard and made it beautiful, while Jimmy slept and the white mice
+      played, while Harmony tossed and tried to sleep and Peter sat in his cold
+      room and smoked his pipe, Anna packed her untidy belongings and added a
+      name now and then to a list that was meant for Peter, a list of possible
+      substitutes for herself in the little household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She left early the next morning, a grim little person who bent over the
+      sleeping boy hungrily, and insisted on carrying her own bag down the
+      stairs. Harmony did not go to the station, but stayed at home, pale and
+      silent, hovering around against Jimmy's awakening and struggling against a
+      feeling of panic. Not that she feared Peter or herself. But she was
+      conventional; shielded girls are accustomed to lean for a certain support
+      on the proprieties, as bridgeplayers depend on rules.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter came back to breakfast, but ate little. Harmony did not even sit
+      down, but drank her cup of coffee standing, looking down at the snow
+      below. Jimmy still slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you sit down?&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not hungry, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can sit down without eating.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was nervous. To cover his uneasiness he was distinctly gruff. He
+      pulled a chair out for her and she sat down. Now that they were face to
+      face the tension was lessened. Peter laid Anna's list on the table between
+      them and bent over it toward her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are hurting me very much, Harry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do you know why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? I am only sorry about Anna. I miss her. I&mdash;I was fond of her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So was I. But that isn't it, Harry. It's something else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm uncomfortable, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So am I. I'm sorry you don't trust me. For that's it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. But, Peter, what will people say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A great deal, if they know. Who is to know? How many people know about
+      us? A handful, at the most, McLean and Mrs. Boyer and one or two others.
+      Of course I can go away until we get some one to take Anna's place, but
+      you'd be here alone at night, and if the youngster had an attack&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, don't leave him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's holiday time. There are no clinics until next week. If you'll put up
+      with me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put up with you, when it is your apartment I use, your food I eat!&rdquo; She
+      almost choked. &ldquo;Peter, I must talk about money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm coming to that. Don't you suppose you more than earn everything?
+      Doesn't it humiliate me hourly to see you working here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter! Would you rob me of my last vestige of self-respect?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This being unanswerable, Peter fell back on his major premise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you'll put up with me for a day or so I'll take this list of Anna's
+      and hunt up some body. Just describe the person you desire and I'll find
+      her.&rdquo; He assumed a certainty he was far from feeling, but it reassured the
+      girl. &ldquo;A woman, of course?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. And not young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Not young,'&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;Fat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony recalled Mrs. Boyer's ample figure and shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not too stout. And agreeable. That's most important.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Agreeable,'&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;Although Anna was hardly agreeable, in the
+      strict sense of the word, was she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was interesting, and&mdash;and human.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Human!'&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;Wanted, a woman, not young, not too stout,
+      agreeable and human. Shall I advertise?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The strain was quite gone by that time. Harmony was smiling. Jimmy,
+      waking, called for food, and the morning of the first day was under way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was well content that morning, in spite of an undercurrent of
+      uneasiness. Before this Anna had shared his proprietorship with him. Now
+      the little household was his. His vicarious domesticity pleased him. He
+      strutted about, taking a new view of his domain; he tightened a doorknob
+      and fastened a noisy window. He inspected the coal-supply and grumbled
+      over its quality. He filled the copper kettle on the stove, carried in the
+      water for Jimmy's morning bath, cleaned the mouse cage. He even insisted
+      on peeling the little German potatoes, until Harmony cried aloud at his
+      wastefulness and took the knife from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And afterward, while Harmony in the sickroom read aloud and Jimmy put the
+      wooden sentry into the cage to keep order, he got out his books and tried
+      to study. But he did little work. His book lay on his knee, his pipe died
+      beside him. The strangeness of the situation came over him, sitting there,
+      and left him rather frightened. He tried to see it from the viewpoint of
+      an outsider, and found himself incredulous and doubting. McLean would
+      resent the situation. Even the Portier was a person to reckon with. The
+      skepticism of the American colony was a thing to fear and avoid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just manage
+      alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his resources to
+      cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had undertaken to shield
+      a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he would and could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brave thoughts were Peter's that snowy morning in the great salon of Maria
+      Theresa, with the cat of the Portier purring before the fire; brave
+      thoughts, cool reason, with Harmony practicing scales very softly while
+      Jimmy slept, and with Anna speeding through a white world, to the
+      accompaniment of bitter meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had meant to go to Semmering that day, but even the urgency of
+      Marie's need faded before his own situation. He wired Stewart that he
+      would come as soon as he could, and immediately after lunch departed for
+      the club, Anna's list in his pocket, Harmony's requirements in mind. He
+      paused at Jimmy's door on his way out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall it be to-day?&rdquo; he inquired. &ldquo;A postcard or a crayon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I could have a dog.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll have a dog when you are better and can take him walking. Wait until
+      spring, son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some more mice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have them&mdash;but not to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What holiday comes next?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;New Year's Day. Suppose I bring you a New Year's card.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's right,&rdquo; agreed Jimmy. &ldquo;One I can send to Dad. Do you think he will
+      come back this year?&rdquo; wistfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter dropped on his baggy knees beside the bed and drew the little wasted
+      figure to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you'll surely see him this year, old man,&rdquo; he said huskily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter walked to the Doctors' Club. On the way he happened on little
+      Georgiev, the Bulgarian, and they went on together. Peter managed to make
+      out that Georgiev was studying English, and that he desired to know the
+      state of health and the abode of the Fraulein Wells. Peter evaded the
+      latter by the simple expedient of pretending not to understand. The little
+      Bulgarian watched him earnestly, his smouldering eyes not without
+      suspicion. There had been much talk in the Pension Schwarz about the
+      departure together of the three Americans. The Jew from Galicia still
+      raved over Harmony's beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Georgiev rather hoped, by staying by Peter, to be led toward his star. But
+      Peter left him at the Doctors' Club, still amiable, but absolutely obtuse
+      to the question nearest the little spy's heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The club was almost deserted. The holidays had taken many of the members
+      out of town. Other men were taking advantage of the vacation to see the
+      city, or to make acquaintance again with families they had hardly seen
+      during the busy weeks before Christmas. The room at the top of the stairs
+      where the wives of the members were apt to meet for chocolate and to
+      exchange the addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room he
+      found McLean. Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary
+      habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for a
+      dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in Peter's mind to enlist McLean's assistance in his difficulties.
+      McLean knew a good many people. He was popular, goodlooking, and in a
+      colony where, unlike London and Paris, the great majority were people of
+      moderate means, he was conspicuously well off. But he was also much
+      younger than Peter and intolerant with the insolence of youth. Peter was
+      thinking hard as he took off his overcoat and ordered beer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as he saw
+      many things. How far his love might carry him, Peter had no idea. It
+      seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and studied him over his
+      magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly the girl's position, and that
+      when he learned it a crisis might be precipitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of three things might happen: He might bend all his energies to second
+      Peter's effort to fill Anna's place, to find the right person; he might
+      suggest taking Anna's place himself, and insist that his presence in the
+      apartment would be as justifiable as Peter's; or he might do at once the
+      thing Peter felt he would do eventually, cut the knot of the difficulty by
+      asking Harmony to marry him. Peter, greeting him pleasantly, decided not
+      to tell him anything, to keep him away if possible until the thing was
+      straightened out, and to wait for an hour at the club in the hope that a
+      solution might stroll in for chocolate and gossip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In any event explanation to McLean would have required justification.
+      Peter disliked the idea. He could humble himself, if necessary, to a
+      woman; he could admit his asininity in assuming the responsibility of
+      Jimmy, for instance, and any woman worthy of the name, or worthy of living
+      in the house with Harmony, would understand. But McLean was young,
+      intolerant. He was more than that, though Peter, concealing from himself
+      just what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival for what
+      he had never claimed. But a rival the boy was. Peter, calmly reading a
+      magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip of the fiercest
+      jealousy. He turned pages automatically, to recall nothing of what he had
+      read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean, sitting across from him, watched him surreptitiously. Big Peter,
+      aggressively masculine, heavy of shoulder, direct of speech and eye, was
+      to him the embodiment of all that a woman should desire in a man. He, too,
+      was jealous, but humbly so. Unlike Peter he knew his situation, was young
+      enough to glory in it. Shameless love is always young; with years comes
+      discretion, perhaps loss of confidence. The Crusaders were youths,
+      pursuing an idea to the ends of the earth and flaunting a lady's guerdon
+      from spear or saddle-bow. The older men among them tucked the handkerchief
+      or bit of a gauntleted glove under jerkin and armor near the heart, and
+      flung to the air the guerdon of some light o' love. McLean would have
+      shouted Harmony's name from the housetops. Peter did not acknowledge even
+      to himself that he was in love with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to McLean after a time that Peter being in the club, and
+      Harmony being in all probability at home, it might be possible to see her
+      alone for a few minutes. He had not intended to go back to the house in
+      the Siebensternstrasse so soon after being peremptorily put out; he had
+      come to the club with the intention of clinching his resolution with a
+      game of cribbage. But fate was playing into his hands. There was no
+      cribbage player round, and Peter himself sat across deeply immersed in a
+      magazine. McLean rose, not stealthily, but without unnecessary noise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far so good. Peter turned a page and went on reading. McLean sauntered
+      to a window, hands in pockets. He even whistled a trifle, under his
+      breath, to prove how very casual were his intentions. Still whistling, he
+      moved toward the door. Peter turned another page, which was curiously soon
+      to have read two columns of small type without illustrations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once out in the hall McLean's movements gained aim and precision. He got
+      his coat, hat and stick, flung the first over his arm and the second on
+      his head, and&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Going out?&rdquo; asked Peter calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, nothing to do here. I've read all the infernal old magazines until
+      I'm sick of them.&rdquo; Indignant, too, from his tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walking?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mind if I go with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, taking down his old overcoat from its hook, turned and caught the
+      boy's eye. It was a swift exchange of glances, but illuminating&mdash;Peter's
+      whimsical, but with a sort of grim determination; McLean's sheepish, but
+      equally determined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rotten afternoon,&rdquo; said McLean as they started for the stairs. &ldquo;Half
+      rain, half snow. Streets are ankle-deep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not particularly keen about walking, but&mdash;I don't care for this
+      tomb alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing was further from McLean's mind than a walk with Peter that
+      afternoon. He hesitated halfway down the upper flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't care for cribbage, do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't know anything about it. How about pinochle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had both stopped, equally determined, equally hesitating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pinochle it is,&rdquo; acquiesced McLean. &ldquo;I was only going because there was
+      nothing to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Things went very well for Peter that afternoon&mdash;up to a certain
+      point. He beat McLean unmercifully, playing with cold deliberation. McLean
+      wearied, fidgeted, railed at his luck. Peter played on grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The club filled up toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women, wives of
+      members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather attentive before he
+      met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted bow he gave her. And,
+      finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one of the women on Anna's list.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, laying down pairs and marking up score, went over Harmony's
+      requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a woman, not young, not
+      too stout, agreeable and human. She was a large, almost bovinely placid
+      person, not at all reminiscent of Anna. She was neat where Anna had been
+      disorderly, well dressed and breezy against Anna's dowdiness and
+      sharpness. Peter, having totaled the score, rose and looked down at
+      McLean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a nice lad,&rdquo; he said, smiling. &ldquo;Sometime I shall teach you the
+      game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How about a lesson to-night in Seven-Star Street?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-night? Why, I'm sorry. We have an engagement for to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;we&rdquo; was deliberate and cruel. McLean writhed. Also the statement was
+      false, but the boy was spared that knowledge for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things went well. Dr. Jennings was badly off for quarters. She would make
+      a change if she could better herself. Peter drew her off to a corner and
+      stated his case. She listened attentively, albeit not without disapproval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She frankly discredited the altruism of Peter's motives when he told her
+      about Harmony. But as the recital went on she found herself rather
+      touched. The story of Jimmy appealed to her. She scolded and lauded Peter
+      in one breath, and what was more to the point, she promised to visit the
+      house in the Siebensternstrasse the next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So Anna Gates has gone home!&rdquo; she reflected. &ldquo;When?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then the girl is there alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She is very young and inexperienced, and the boy&mdash;it's
+      myocarditis. She's afraid to be left with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she quite alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely, and without funds, except enough for her lessons. Our
+      arrangement was that she should keep the house going; that was her share.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Jennings was impressed. It was impossible to talk to Peter and not
+      believe him. Women trusted Peter always.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've been very foolish, Dr. Byrne,&rdquo; she said as she rose; &ldquo;but you've
+      been disinterested enough to offset that and to put some of us to shame.
+      To-morrow at three, if it suits you. You said the Siebensternstrasse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter went home exultant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Christmas-Day had had a softening effect on Mrs. Boyer. It had opened
+      badly. It was the first Christmas she had spent away from her children,
+      and there had been little of the holiday spirit in her attitude as she
+      prepared the Christmas breakfast. After that, however, things happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, under her plate she had found a frivolous chain and
+      pendant which she had admired. And when her eyes filled up, as they did
+      whenever she was emotionally moved, the doctor had come round the table
+      and put both his arms about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too young for you? Not a bit!&rdquo; he said heartily. &ldquo;You're better-looking
+      then you ever were, Jennie; and if you weren't you're the only woman for
+      me, anyhow. Don't you think I realize what this exile means to you and
+      that you're doing it for me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I don't mind it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you do. To-night we'll go out and make a night of it, shall we?
+      Supper at the Grand, the theater, and then the Tabarin, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She loosened herself from his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall I wear? Those horrible things the children bought me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw 'em away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're not worn at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw them out. Get rid of the things the children got you. Go out
+      to-morrow and buy something you like&mdash;not that I don't like you in
+      anything or without&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frank!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be happy, that's the thing. It's the first Christmas without the family,
+      and I miss them too. But we're together, dear. That's the big thing. Merry
+      Christmas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An auspicious opening, that, to Christmas-Day. And they had carried out
+      the program as outlined. Mrs. Boyer had enjoyed it, albeit a bit horrified
+      at the Christmas gayety at the Tabarin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning, however, she awakened with a keen reaction. Her head
+      ached. She had a sense of taint over her. She was virtue rampant again, as
+      on the day she had first visited the old lodge in the Siebensternstrasse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hardly astonishing that by association of ideas Harmony came into
+      her mind again, a brand that might even yet be snatched from the burning.
+      She had been a bit hasty before, she admitted to herself. There was a
+      woman doctor named Gates, although her address at the club was given as
+      Pension Schwarz. She determined to do her shopping early and then to visit
+      the house in the Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard woman, for all her
+      inflexible morality, and more than once she had had an uneasy memory of
+      Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face the afternoon of her visit. She
+      had been a watchful mother over a not particularly handsome family of
+      daughters. This lovely young girl needed mothering and she had refused it.
+      She would go back, and if she found she had been wrong and the girl was
+      deserving and honest, she would see what could be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day was wretched. The snow had turned to rain. Mrs. Boyer, shopping,
+      dragged wet skirts and damp feet from store to store. She found nothing
+      that she cared for after all. The garments that looked chic in the windows
+      or on manikins in the shops, were absurd on her. Her insistent bosom
+      bulged, straight lines became curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets gaped,
+      collars choked her or shocked her by their absence. In the mirror of Marie
+      Jedlicka, clad in familiar garments that had accommodated themselves to
+      the idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump, rather comely
+      matron. Here before the plate glass of the modiste, under the glare of a
+      hundred lights, side by side with a slim Austrian girl who looked like a
+      willow wand, Mrs. Boyer was grotesque, ridiculous, monstrous. She
+      shuddered. She almost wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was bad preparation for a visit to the Siebensternstrasse. Mrs. Boyer,
+      finding her vanity gone, convinced that she was an absurdity physically,
+      fell back for comfort on her soul. She had been a good wife and mother;
+      she was chaste, righteous. God had been cruel to her in the flesh, but He
+      had given her the spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame wishes not the gown? It is beautiful&mdash;see the embroidery! And
+      the neck may be filled with chiffon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Young woman,&rdquo; she said grimly, &ldquo;I see the embroidery; and the neck may be
+      filled with chiffon, but not for me! And when you have had five children,
+      you will not buy clothes like that either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the kindliness was gone from the visit to the Siebensternstrasse; only
+      the determination remained. Wounded to the heart of her self-esteem, her
+      pride in tatters, she took her way to the old lodge and climbed the
+      stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She found a condition of mild excitement. Jimmy had slept long after his
+      bath. Harmony practiced, cut up a chicken for broth, aired blankets for
+      the chair into which Peter on his return was to lift the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was called to inspect the mouse-cage, which, according to Jimmy, had
+      strawberries in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Far back,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;There in the cotton, Harry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not strawberries. Harmony opened the cage and very tenderly
+      took out the cotton nest. Eight tiny pink baby mice, clean washed by the
+      mother, lay curled in a heap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a stupendous moment. The joy of vicarious parentage was Jimmy's. He
+      named them all immediately and demanded food for them. On Harmony's
+      delicate explanation that this was unnecessary, life took on a new meaning
+      for Jimmy. He watched the mother lest she slight one. His responsibility
+      weighed on him. Also his inquiring mind was very busy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how did they get there?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God sent them, just as he sends babies of all sorts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he send me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a good one on you, Harry. My father found me in a hollow tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don't you think God had something to do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy pondered this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;God sent Daddy to find me so that I would be
+      his little boy. You never happened to see any babies when you were out
+      walking, did you, Harry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in stumps&mdash;but I probably wasn't looking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy eyed her with sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may some day. Would you like to have one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much,&rdquo; said Harmony, and flushed delightfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was disposed to press the matter, to urge immediate maternity on
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could lay it here on the bed,&rdquo; he offered, &ldquo;and I'd watch it. When
+      they yell you let 'em suck your finger. I knew a woman once that had a
+      baby and she did that. And it could watch Isabella.&rdquo; Isabella was the
+      mother mouse. &ldquo;And when I'm better I could take it walking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Harmony gravely, &ldquo;is mighty fine of you, Jimmy boy. I&mdash;I'll
+      think about it.&rdquo; She never denied Jimmy anything, so now she temporized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll ask Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had a half-hysterical moment; then:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wouldn't it be better,&rdquo; she asked, &ldquo;to keep anything of that sort a
+      secret? And to surprise Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy loved a secret. He played with it in lieu of other occupation. His
+      uncertain future was sown thick with secrets that would never flower into
+      reality. Thus Peter had shamelessly promised him a visit to the circus
+      when he was able to go, Harmony not to be told until the tickets were
+      bought. Anna had similarly promised to send him from America a pitcher's
+      glove and a baseball bat. To this list of futurities he now added
+      Harmony's baby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony brought in her violin and played softly to him, not to disturb the
+      sleeping mice. She sang, too, a verse that the Big Soprano had been fond
+      of and that Jimmy loved. Not much of a voice was Harmony's, but sweet and
+      low and very true, as became her violinist's ear.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Ah, well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+   Deeply buried from human eyes,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      she sang, her clear eyes luminous.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;And in the hereafter, angels may
+   Roll the stone from its grave away!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer mounted the stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She had
+      snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although that very
+      morning she had detested the suit, her round of shopping had again
+      endeared it to her. She told the Portier in English what she thought of
+      him, and climbed ponderously, pausing at each landing to examine the
+      damage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, having sung Jimmy to sleep, was in the throes of an experiment.
+      She was trying to smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very human young person was Harmony, apt to be exceedingly wretched if
+      her hat were of last year's fashion, anxious to be inconspicuous by doing
+      what every one else was doing, conventional as are the very young, fearful
+      of being an exception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And nearly every one was smoking. Many of the young women whom she met at
+      the master's house had yellowed fingers and smoked in the anteroom; the
+      Big Soprano had smoked; Anna and Scatchy had smoked; in the coffee-houses
+      milliners' apprentices produced little silver mouth-pieces to prevent
+      soiling their pretty lips and smoked endlessly. Even Peter had admitted
+      that it was not a vice, but only a comfortable bad habit. And Anna had
+      left a handful of cigarettes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was not smoking; she was experimenting. Peter and Anna had smoked
+      together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without reasoning it out,
+      Harmony was experimenting toward the end of establishing her relations
+      with Peter still further on friendly and comradely grounds. Two men might
+      smoke together; a man and a woman might smoke together as friends.
+      According to Harmony's ideas, a girl paring potatoes might inspire
+      sentiment, but smoking a cigarette&mdash;never!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not like it. She thought, standing before her little mirror, that
+      she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her lips together, as she
+      had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke in a thin line. She smoked
+      very hard, so that she stood in the center of a gray nimbus. She hated it,
+      but she persisted. Perhaps it grew on one; perhaps, also, if she walked
+      about it would choke her less. She practiced holding the thing between her
+      first and second fingers, and found that easier than smoking. Then she
+      went to the salon where there was more air, and tried exhaling through her
+      nose. It made her sneeze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the sneeze came Mrs. Boyer's ring. Harmony thought very fast. It might
+      be the bread or the milk, but again&mdash;She flung the cigarette into the
+      stove, shut the door, and answered the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer's greeting was colder than she had intended. It put Harmony on
+      the defensive at once, made her uncomfortable. Like all the innocent
+      falsely accused she looked guiltier than the guiltiest. Under Mrs. Boyer's
+      searching eyes the enormity of her situation overwhelmed her. And over
+      all, through salon and passage, hung the damning odor of the cigarette.
+      Harmony, leading the way in, was a sheep before her shearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm calling on all of you,&rdquo; said Mrs. Boyer, sniping. &ldquo;I meant to bring
+      Dr. Boyer's cards for every one, including Dr. Byrne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry. Dr. Byrne is out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Dr. Gates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&mdash;she is away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously changed the subject,
+      requesting a needle and thread to draw the rent together. It had been in
+      Harmony's mind to explain the situation, to show Jimmy to Mrs. Boyer, to
+      throw herself on the older woman's sympathy, to ask advice. But the
+      visitor's attitude made this difficult. To add to her discomfort, through
+      the grating in the stove door was coming a thin thread of smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was, after all, Mrs. Boyer who broached the subject again. She had had
+      a cup of tea, and Harmony, sitting on a stool, had mended the rent so that
+      it could hardly be seen. Mrs. Boyer, softened by the tea and by the
+      proximity of Harmony's lovely head bent over her task, grew slightly more
+      expansive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to tell you something, Miss Wells,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You remember my
+      other visit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfectly.&rdquo; Harmony bent still lower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did you an injustice at that time. I've been sorry ever since. I
+      thought that there was no Dr. Gates. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to deny
+      it. People do things in this wicked city that they wouldn't do at home. I
+      confess I misjudged Peter Byrne. You can give him my apologies, since he
+      won't see me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he isn't here or of course he'd see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; demanded Mrs. Boyer grimly, &ldquo;if Peter Byrne is not here, who has
+      been smoking cigarettes in this room? There is one still burning in that
+      stove!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's hand was forced. She was white as she cut the brown-silk thread
+      and rose to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that I'd better go back a few weeks, Mrs. Boyer, and
+      tell you a story, if you have time to listen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is disagreeable&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. It is about Peter Byrne and myself, and&mdash;some others. It
+      is really about Peter. Mrs. Boyer, will you come very quietly across the
+      hall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, expecting Heaven knows what, rose with celerity. Harmony led
+      the way to Jimmy's door and opened it. He was still asleep, a wasted small
+      figure on the narrow bed. Beside him the mice frolicked in their cage, the
+      sentry kept guard over Peter's shameless letters from the Tyrol, the
+      strawberry babies wriggled in their cotton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are not going to have him very long,&rdquo; said Harmony softly. &ldquo;Peter is
+      making him happy for a little while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Back in the salon of Maria Theresa she told the whole story. Mrs. Boyer
+      found it very affecting. Harmony sat beside her on a stool and she kept
+      her hand on the girl's shoulder. When the narrative reached Anna's going
+      away, however, she took it away. From that point on she sat
+      uncompromisingly rigid and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you mean to say,&rdquo; she exploded when Harmony had finished, &ldquo;that you
+      intend to stay on here, just the two of you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Jimmy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah! What has the child to do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will find some one to take Anna's place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt it. And until you do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing wicked in what we are doing. Don't you see, Mrs. Boyer,
+      I can't leave the boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since Peter is so altruistic, let him hire a nurse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bad as things were, Harmony smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A nurse!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Why, do you realize that he is keeping three people
+      now on what is starvation for one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he's a fool!&rdquo; Mrs. Boyer rose in majesty. &ldquo;I'm not going to leave
+      you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry. You must see&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see nothing but a girl deliberately putting herself in a compromising
+      portion and worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Boyer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get your things on. I guess Dr. Boyer and I can look after you until we
+      can send you home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not going home&mdash;yet,&rdquo; said poor Harmony, biting her lip to
+      steady it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Back and forth waged the battle, Mrs. Boyer assailing, Harmony offering
+      little defense but standing firm on her refusal to go as long as Peter
+      would let her remain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means so much to me,&rdquo; she ventured, goaded. &ldquo;And I earn my lodging and
+      board. I work hard and&mdash;I make him comfortable. It costs him very
+      little and I give him something in exchange. All men are not alike. If the
+      sort you have known are&mdash;are different&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was unfortunate. Mrs. Boyer stiffened. She ceased offensive tactics,
+      and retired grimly into the dignity of her high calling of virtuous wife
+      and mother. She washed her hands of Harmony and Peter. She tied on her
+      veil with shaking hands, and prepared to leave Harmony to her fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me your mother's address,&rdquo; she demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You absolutely refuse to save yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to save
+      myself from, Mrs. Boyer&mdash;uncharitable people, and&mdash;and cruel
+      people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Meaning me!&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;My dear child, people are always cruel who
+      try to save us from ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna's specious arguments must pop into her
+      head at that instant and demand expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old standards
+      have gone. It is what one's conscience condemns that is wrong, isn't it?
+      Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit the average, not the
+      exception.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna! Anna!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are impossible!&rdquo; she snapped. &ldquo;After all, I believe it is Peter who
+      needs protection! I shall speak to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone. But if
+      you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon YOU, keep your
+      views to yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy's room and sank on
+      her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the coverlet; she dared
+      not touch it for fear of waking him&mdash;but she laid her cheek close to
+      it for comfort. When Peter came in, much later, he found the boy wide
+      awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think she's been crying,&rdquo; Jimmy whispered. &ldquo;She's been sobbing in her
+      sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club. It was
+      typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
+      there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings.
+      Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy
+      of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and
+      fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt.
+      He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a
+      magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and really
+      in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and Harmony were
+      not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and the reception
+      room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in which he and
+      Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter to scowl over
+      his books at them, a future in which life was one long piano-violin duo,
+      with the candles in the chandelier going out one by one, leaving them at
+      last alone in scented darkness together&mdash;McLean heard nothing until
+      the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating
+      taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment that
+      Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation was a
+      little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with a
+      stifled oath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is exactly as I tell you,&rdquo; she was saying. &ldquo;If Peter Byrne is trying
+      to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been
+      there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the
+      club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one
+      thing remains, she is not there now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found a
+      &ldquo;comfortable&rdquo; at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage.
+      McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him. The
+      cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of protests
+      from its frantic passenger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence that
+      afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He had
+      thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew it now
+      in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that maddened him:
+      the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress in Peter's voice
+      when he spoke to the girl, Peter's steady eyes in the semi-gloom of the
+      salon while Harmony played.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed,
+      bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for
+      half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the girl
+      first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a madman. Peter
+      was already there; his footprints were fresh in the slush of the path. The
+      house door was closed but not locked. McLean ran up the stairs. It was
+      barely twilight outside, but the staircase well was dark. At the upper
+      landing he was compelled to fumble for the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the salon came a
+      glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and furious, faced Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see Harmony,&rdquo; he said without preface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when the bell
+      rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs. Boyer's visit. In
+      the second between the peal of the bell and his opening the door he had
+      decided what to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much shorter as
+      slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the kitchen, I think. Come into the salon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean flung off his coat. Peter closed the door behind him and stood just
+      inside. He had his pipe as usual. &ldquo;I came to see her, not you, Byrne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I gather. I'll let you see her, of course, but don't you want to see
+      me first?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to take her away from here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? Are you better able to care for her than I am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean stood rigid. He had thrust his clenched hands into his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a scoundrel, Byrne,&rdquo; he said steadily. &ldquo;Why didn't you tell me
+      this this afternoon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I knew if I did you'd do just what you are doing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to keep her here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter changed color at the thrust, but he kept himself in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not keeping her here,&rdquo; he said patiently. &ldquo;I'm doing the best I can
+      under the circumstances.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then your best is pretty bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps. If you would try to remember the circumstances, McLean,&mdash;that
+      the girl has no place else to go, practically no money, and that I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember one circumstance, that you are living here alone with her and
+      that you're crazy in love with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That has nothing to do with you. As long as I treat her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you be good enough to let me finish what I am trying to say? She's
+      safe with me. When I say that I mean it. She will not go away from here
+      with you or with any one else if I can prevent it. And if you care enough
+      about her to try to keep her happy you'll not let her know you have been
+      here. I've got a woman coming to take Anna's place. That ought to satisfy
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Jennings?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She'll not come. Mrs. Boyer has been talking to her. Inside of an hour
+      the whole club will have it&mdash;every American in Vienna will know about
+      it in a day or so. I tell you, Byrne, you're doing an awful thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter drew a long breath. He had had his bad half-hour before McLean came;
+      had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony trying to smile, see her
+      dragging about, languid and white, see her tragic attempts to greet him on
+      the old familiar footing. Through it all he had been sustained by the
+      thought that a day or two days would see the old footing reestablished,
+      another woman in the house, life again worth the living and Harmony
+      smiling up frankly into his eyes. Now this hope had departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't keep me from seeing her, you know,&rdquo; McLean persisted. &ldquo;I've got
+      to put this thing to her. She's got to choose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What alternative have you to suggest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd marry her if she'd have me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After all Peter had expected that. And, if she cared for the boy wouldn't
+      that be best for her? What had he to offer against that? He couldn't
+      marry. He could only offer her shelter, against everything else. Even then
+      he did not dislike McLean. He was a man, every slender inch of him, this
+      boy musician. Peter's heart sank, but he put down his pipe and turned to
+      the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll call her,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But, since this concerns me very vitally, I
+      should like to be here while you put the thing to her. After that if you
+      like&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He called Harmony. She had given Jimmy his supper and was carrying out a
+      tray that seemed hardly touched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He won't eat to-night,&rdquo; she said miserably. &ldquo;Peter, if he stops eating,
+      what can we do? He is so weak!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, took the tray from her gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harry dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I want you to come into the salon. Some one wishes
+      to speak to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Harry, do you remember that evening in the kitchen when&mdash;Do you
+      recall what I promised?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure you know what I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right, then. McLean wants to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, looking up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;McLean? You look so grave, Peter. What is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will tell you. Nothing alarming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter gave McLean a minute alone after all, while he carried the tray to
+      the kitchen. He had no desire to play watchdog over the girl, he told
+      himself savagely; only to keep himself straight with her and to save her
+      from McLean's impetuosity. He even waited in the kitchen to fill and light
+      his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean had worked himself into a very fair passion. He was intense, almost
+      theatrical, as he stood with folded arms waiting for Harmony. So entirely
+      did the girl fill his existence that he forgot, or did not care to
+      remember, how short a time he had known her. As Harmony she dominated his
+      life and his thoughts; as Harmony he addressed her when, rather startled,
+      she entered the salon and stood just inside the closed door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter said you wanted to speak to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean groaned. &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is always Peter. Look here, Harmony,
+      you cannot stay here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is only for a few hours. To-morrow some one is coming. And, anyhow,
+      Peter is going to Semmering. We know it is unusual, but what can we do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unusual! It's&mdash;it's damnable. It's the appearance of the thing,
+      don't you see that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it is rather silly to talk of appearance when there is no one to
+      care. And how can I leave? Jimmy needs me all the time&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's another idiocy of Peter's. What does he mean by putting you in
+      this position?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am one of Peter's idiocies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter entered on that. He took in the situation with a glance, and Harmony
+      turned to him; but if she had expected Peter to support her, she was
+      disappointed. Whatever decision she was to make must be her own, in
+      Peter's troubled mind. He crossed the room and stood at one of the
+      windows, looking out, a passive participant in the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day had been a trying one for Harmony. What she chose to consider
+      Peter's defection was a fresh stab. She glanced from McLean, flushed and
+      excited, to Peter's impassive back. Then she sat down, rather limp, and
+      threw out her hands helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I to do?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;Every one comes with cruel things to
+      say, but no one tells me what to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned away from the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can leave here,&rdquo; ventured McLean. &ldquo;That's the first thing. After that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and after that, what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean glanced at Peter. Then he took a step toward the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could marry me, Harmony,&rdquo; he said unsteadily. &ldquo;I hadn't expected to
+      tell you so soon, or before a third person.&rdquo; He faltered before Harmony's
+      eyes, full of bewilderment. &ldquo;I'd be very happy if you&mdash;if you could
+      see it that way. I care a great deal, you see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed hours to Peter before she made any reply, and that her voice
+      came from miles away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it really as bad as that?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Have I made such a mess of
+      things that some one, either you or Peter, must marry me to straighten
+      things out? I don't want to marry any one. Do I have to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly you don't have to,&rdquo; said Peter. There was relief in his voice,
+      relief and also something of exultation. &ldquo;McLean, you mean well, but
+      marriage isn't the solution. We were getting along all right until our
+      friends stepped in. Let Mrs. Boyer howl all over the colony; there will be
+      one sensible woman somewhere to come and be comfortable here with us. In
+      the interval we'll manage, unless Harmony is afraid. In that case&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Afraid of what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men exchanged glances, McLean helpless, Peter triumphant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not care what Mrs. Boyer says, at least not much. And I am not
+      afraid of anything else at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean picked up his overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At least,&rdquo; he appealed to Peter, &ldquo;you'll come over to my place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean made a final appeal to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If this gets out,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you are going to regret it all your life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall have nothing to regret,&rdquo; she retorted proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had Peter not been there McLean would have made a better case, would have
+      pleaded with her, would have made less of a situation that roused her
+      resentment and more of his love for her. He was very hard hit, very young.
+      He was almost hysterical with rage and helplessness; he wanted to slap
+      her, to take her in his arms. He writhed under the restraint of Peter's
+      steady eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got to the door and turned, furious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it's up to you,&rdquo; he flung at Peter. &ldquo;You're old enough to know
+      better; she isn't. And don't look so damned superior. You're human, like
+      the rest of us. And if any harm comes to her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here unexpectedly Peter held out his hand, and after a sheepish moment
+      McLean took it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, old man,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;And&mdash;don't be an ass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean knew
+      what in his heart he had known all along&mdash;that the girl was safe
+      enough; that all that was to fear was the gossip of scandal-lovers. He
+      took Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony stood before her very erect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I've said too much; I always do,&rdquo; he said contritely. &ldquo;But you
+      know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am only sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic moment for
+      him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door and down the dark
+      stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax, after all that, to have Peter
+      discover he had gone without his hat and toss it down to him a flight
+      below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between Harmony and
+      Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked during the meal of
+      careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and Peter's proposed trip to
+      Semmering, avoided each other's eyes, ate little or nothing. Once when
+      Harmony passed Peter his coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between
+      them they dropped the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns, Peter
+      wretched and silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from
+      Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days. In two
+      days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some one else. In two
+      days some of the restraint would have worn off. Things would never be the
+      same, but they would be forty-eight hours better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading aloud to
+      him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a valise for the next
+      day's journey and counted out into an envelope half of the money he had
+      with him. This he labeled &ldquo;Household Expenses&rdquo; and set it up on his table,
+      leaning against his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony about. The
+      salon was dark except for the study lamp turned down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers
+      and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the landing; Peter
+      carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles on Jimmy's stand and
+      wrote full directions for every emergency he could imagine. Then, finding
+      it still only nine o'clock, he turned up the lamp in the salon and wrote
+      an exciting letter from Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb, wandering on
+      the mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and carried down
+      into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because he stood so in
+      loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable that before long Jimmy
+      would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and, of course, because it had been
+      a trying day all through, Peter's lips were none too steady as he folded
+      up the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and closed
+      the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to feel his way
+      through the room. It touched a little sweater coat of Harmony's, hanging
+      over the back of a chair. Peter picked it up in a very passion of
+      tenderness and held it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Little girl!&rdquo; he choked. &ldquo;My little girl! God help me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to find that
+      the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could rouse such a storm
+      in him. It made him pause. He put down the coat and pulled himself up
+      sharply. McLean was right; he was only human stuff, very poor human stuff.
+      He put the little coat down hastily, only to lift it again gently to his
+      lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, dear,&rdquo; he whispered. &ldquo;Goodnight, Harmony.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and supper
+      that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor pension.
+      They came to make inquiries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of the
+      bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still lacked an
+      occupant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly
+      medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of
+      language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life are
+      gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual
+      disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised
+      eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of
+      Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter
+      was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The women were also wicked,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Of a man what does one expect?
+      But of a woman! And the younger one looked&mdash;Herr Gott! She had the
+      eyes of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of
+      them left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The
+      Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he so
+      to me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says,&rdquo; interpreted Dr. Jennings, &ldquo;that they were a bad lot&mdash;that
+      the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on
+      the other woman's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What an escape for you!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If you had gone there to live and
+      then found the establishment&mdash;queer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.
+      Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;American ladies!&rdquo; said Olga. &ldquo;Two, old and fat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More hot water!&rdquo; growled Katrina. &ldquo;Why do not the Americans stay in their
+      own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne
+      and the others!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of a certainty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then let me to the door!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says&mdash;how she is
+      wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she sent
+      them all away. Here, take the door!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the
+      dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having
+      retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best forgotten
+      or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a slovenly girl
+      in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her head. &ldquo;The Frau
+      Schwarz is wrong,&rdquo; cried Olga passionately in Vienna dialect. &ldquo;They were
+      good, all of them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What in the world&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr Georgiev
+      eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Jennings was puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wishes to know where the girl lives,&rdquo; she interpreted to Mrs. Boyer.
+      &ldquo;A man wishes to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally!&rdquo; said Mrs. Boyer. &ldquo;Well, don't tell her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to be
+      told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev,
+      Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were
+      inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a
+      gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says,&rdquo; she interpreted as they walked on, &ldquo;that Dr. Peter&mdash;by
+      which I suppose she means Dr. Byrne&mdash;has left a necktie, and that
+      she'll be in hot water if she does not return it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In love with him, probably, like the others!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very early and
+      without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying diagonally across his
+      small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets. The communicating door into
+      Harmony's room was open. Peter kept his eyes carefully from it, but his
+      ears were less under control. He could hear her soft breathing. There were
+      days coming when Peter would stand where he stood then and listen, and
+      find only silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully behind him
+      and lighting a match to find his way down the staircase. The Portier was
+      not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and to stand by while he donned the
+      trousers which he deemed necessary to the dignity of his position before
+      he opened the street door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter. The dawn
+      grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The hurrying crowds
+      at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his coffee, taken from a bare
+      table in the station. The horizontal morning sunlight, shining in through
+      marvelously clean windows, warmed the marble of the floor, made black
+      shadows beside the heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into gold the
+      hair of a toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The same morning
+      light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of one of his shoes.
+      Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at the bits of dust that
+      floated in the sunshine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a passing
+      thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it lasted Peter was a
+      king. Everything was well. The world was his oyster. Life was his, to make
+      it what he would&mdash;youth and hope and joy. Under the beatific
+      influence he expanded, grew, almost shone. Youth and hope and joy&mdash;that
+      cometh in the morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ecstasy passed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer shone; he
+      still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and hugged it. He hunted
+      out a beggar he had passed and gave him five Hellers. He helped a
+      suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered bundle; he called the guard
+      on the train &ldquo;son&rdquo; and forced a grin out of that dignitary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter traveled third-class, which was quite comfortable, and no bother
+      about &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen&rdquo; signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness persisted as
+      far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing ruggedness of the scenery and
+      his first view of the Raxalpe, came recollection of the urgency of
+      Stewart's last message, of Marie Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy
+      that awaited him at the end of his journey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected. Love was a
+      blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in his corner
+      and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he recalled the
+      look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when she looked at
+      Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little thing. If only
+      she'd had a chance!&mdash;Why wasn't he rich enough to help the ones who
+      needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no one the wiser,
+      and make her way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!&rdquo; Peter reflected. &ldquo;Poor little
+      guttersnipe!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather was beautiful. The sleet of the previous day in Vienna had
+      been a deep snowfall on the mountains. The Schwarza was frozen, the castle
+      of Liechtenstein was gray against a white world. A little pilgrimage
+      church far below seemed snowed in against the faithful. The third-class
+      compartment filled with noisy skiing parties. The old woman opened her
+      oilcloth bundle, and taking a cat out of a box inside fed it a sausage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up and up, past the Weinzettelwand and the Station Breitenstein, across
+      the highest viaduct, the Kalte Rinne, and so at last to Semmering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glow had died at last for Peter. He did not like his errand, was very
+      vague, indeed, as to just what that errand might be. He was stiff and
+      rather cold. Also he thought the cat might stifle in the oilcloth, but the
+      old woman too clearly distrusted him to make it possible to interfere.
+      Anyhow, he did not know the German for either cat or oilcloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This made him
+      vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know Stewart well enough to
+      know whether he was punctilious in such matters or not: as a matter of
+      fact he hardly knew him at all. It was because he had appealed to him that
+      Peter was there, it being only necessary to Peter to be needed, and he was
+      anywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his valise
+      and started up&mdash;first long flights of steps through the pines, then a
+      steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he met groups coming
+      down, men that he thought probably American, pretty women in &ldquo;tams&rdquo; and
+      sweaters. He watched for Marie, but there was no sign of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he turned in at
+      the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people following it, coming
+      toward him. It was a singularly silent party. Peter, with his hand on the
+      door-knocker, watched its approach with some curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round it. Even
+      then Peter did not understand. He did not understand until he saw Stewart,
+      limp and unconscious, lifted out of the straw and carried toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery. And
+      Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
+      possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for Stewart,
+      of publicity that would mean an end to the situation. But every inch of
+      her soul was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down,
+      and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree
+      tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps
+      even not yet dead&mdash;that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time
+      and suffer!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
+      threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter, it had
+      been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But there was this
+      difference, whereas before he had drawn her back from the window and
+      clapped her into sanity, now he let her alone. At the end of one of their
+      quarrels she had flung out on to the balcony, and then had watched him
+      through the opening in the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over the
+      mountain roads, seldom alone with Anita, but always near her. He left
+      Marie sulking or sewing, as the case might be. He returned in the evening
+      to find her still sulking, still sewing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Marie did not sulk all day, or sew. She too was out, never far from
+      Stewart, always watching. Many times she escaped discovery only by a
+      miracle, as when she stooped behind an oxcart, pretending to tie her shoe,
+      or once when they all met face to face, and although she lowered her veil
+      Stewart must have known her instantly had he not been so intent on helping
+      Anita over a slippery gutter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She planned a dozen forms of revenge and found them impossible of
+      execution. Stewart himself was frightfully unhappy. For the first time in
+      his life he was really in love, with all the humility of the condition.
+      There were days when he would not touch Anita's hand, when he hardly
+      spoke, when the girl herself would have been outraged at his conduct had
+      she not now and then caught him watching her, seen the wretchedness in his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The form of Marie's revenge was unpremeditated, after all. The light
+      mountain snow was augmented by a storm; roads were ploughed through early
+      in the morning, leaving great banks on either side. Sleigh-bells were
+      everywhere. Coasting parties made the steep roads a menace to the
+      pedestrian; every up-climbing sleigh carried behind it a string of sleds,
+      going back to the starting-point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Below the hotel was the Serpentine Coast, a long and dangerous course,
+      full of high-banked curves, of sudden descents, of long straightaway
+      dashes through the woodland. Two miles, perhaps three, it wound its
+      tortuous way down the mountain. Up by the highroad to the crest again,
+      only a mile or less. Thus it happened that the track was always clear,
+      except for speeding sleds. No coasters, dragging sleds back up the slide,
+      interfered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The track was crowded. Every minute a sled set out, sped down the
+      straightaway, dipped, turned, disappeared. A dozen would be lined up,
+      waiting for the interval and the signal. And here, watching from the porch
+      of the church, in the very shadow of the saints, Marie found her revenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart had given her a little wrist watch. Stewart and Anita were twelfth
+      in line. By the watch, then, twelve minutes down the mountain-side,
+      straight down through the trees to a curve that Marie knew well, a bad
+      curve, only to be taken by running well up on the snowbank. Beyond the
+      snowbank there was a drop, fifteen feet, perhaps more, into the yard of a
+      Russian villa. Stewart and Anita were twelfth; a man in a green
+      stocking-cap was eleventh. The hillside was steep. Marie negotiated it by
+      running from tree to tree, catching herself, steadying for a second, then
+      down again. Once she fell and rolled a little distance. There was no time
+      to think; perhaps had she thought she would have weakened. She had no real
+      courage, only desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she reached the track the man in the green stocking-cap was in sight. A
+      minute and a half she had then, not more. She looked about her hastily. A
+      stone might serve her purpose, almost anything that would throw the sled
+      out of its course. She saw a tree branch just above the track and dragged
+      at it frantically. Some one was shouting at her from an upper window of
+      the Russian villa. She did not hear. Stewart and Anita had made the curve
+      above and were coming down at frantic speed. Marie stood, her back to the
+      oncoming rush of the sled, swaying slightly. When she could hear the
+      singing of the runners she stooped and slid the tree branch out against
+      the track.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had acted almost by instinct, but with devilish skill. The sled swung
+      to one side up the snowbank, and launched itself into the air. Marie heard
+      the thud and the silence that followed it. Then she turned and scuttled
+      like a hunted thing up the mountain side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter put in a bad day. Marie was not about, could not be located.
+      Stewart, suffering from concussion, lay insensible all day and all of the
+      night. Peter could find no fracture, but felt it wise to get another
+      opinion. In the afternoon he sent for a doctor from the Kurhaus and
+      learned for the first time that Anita had also been hurt&mdash;a broken
+      arm. &ldquo;Not serious,&rdquo; said the Kurhaus man. &ldquo;She is brave, very brave, the
+      young woman. I believe they are engaged?&rdquo; Peter said he did not know and
+      thought very hard. Where was Marie? Not gone surely. Here about him lay
+      all her belongings, even her purse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward evening Stewart showed some improvement. He was not conscious, but
+      he swallowed better and began to toss about. Peter, who had had a long day
+      and very little sleep the night before, began to look jaded. He would have
+      sent for a nurse from the Kurhaus, but he doubted Stewart's ability to
+      stand any extra financial strain, and Peter could not help any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The time for supper passed, and no Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The landlady sent up a tray to Peter, stewed meat and potatoes, a salad,
+      coffee. Peter sat in a corner with his back to Stewart and ate ravenously.
+      He had had nothing since the morning's coffee. After that he sat down
+      again by the bed to watch. There was little to do but watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meal had made him drowsy. He thought of his pipe. Perhaps if he got
+      some fresh air and a smoke! He remembered the balcony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was there on the balcony that he found Marie, a cowering thing that
+      pushed his hands away when he would have caught her and broke into
+      passionate crying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot! I cannot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cannot what?&rdquo; demanded Peter gently, watching her. So near was the
+      balcony rail!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw myself over. I've tried, Peter. I cannot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think not!&rdquo; said Peter sternly. &ldquo;Just now when we need you, too!
+      Come in and don't be a foolish child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Marie would not go in. She held back, clinging tight to Peter's big
+      hand, moaning out in the dialect of the people that always confused him
+      her story of the day, of what she had done, of watching Stewart brought
+      back, of stealing into the house and through an adjacent room to the
+      balcony, of her desperation and her cowardice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was numb with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, quite childish, helpless.
+      Peter stood out on the balcony with his arm round her, while the night
+      wind beat about them, and pondered what was best to do. He thought she
+      might come in and care for Stewart, at least, until he was conscious. He
+      could get her some supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I was seen. They are searching for me now. Oh,
+      Peter! Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is searching for you? Who saw you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The people in the Russian villa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did they see your face?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wore a veil. I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then come in and change your clothes. There is a train down at midnight.
+      You can take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This raised a delicate question. Marie absolutely refused to take
+      Stewart's money. She had almost none of her own. And there were other
+      complications&mdash;where was she to go? The family of the injured girl
+      did not suspect her since they did not know of her existence. She might
+      get away without trouble. But after that, what?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter pondered this on the balcony, while Marie in the bedroom was
+      changing her clothing, soaked with a day in the snow. He came to the
+      inevitable decision, the decision he knew at the beginning that he was
+      going to make.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could only put it up to Harmony first!&rdquo; he reflected. &ldquo;But she will
+      understand when I tell her. She always understands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing there on the little balcony, with tragedy the thickness of a pine
+      board beyond him, Peter experienced a bit of the glow of the morning, as
+      of one who stumbling along in a dark place puts a hand on a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the room. Stewart was lying very still and breathing easily.
+      On her knees beside the bed knelt Marie. At Peter's step she rose and
+      faced him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am leaving him, Peter, for always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said Peter heartily. &ldquo;Better for you and better for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie drew a long breath. &ldquo;The night train,&rdquo; she said listlessly, &ldquo;is an
+      express. I had forgotten. It is double fare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What of that, little sister?&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;What is a double fare when it
+      means life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And there will be
+      happiness, little sister.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was almost happy that morning. For one thing, he had won
+      honorable mention at the Schubert Society the night before; for another,
+      that night the Engel was to sing Mignon, and the Portier had spent his
+      Christmas tips for a ticket. All day long he had been poring over the
+      score.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen?'&rdquo; he sang with feeling while
+      he polished the floors. He polished them with his feet, wearing felt boots
+      for the purpose, and executing in the doing a sort of ungainly dance&mdash;a
+      sprinkle of wax, right foot forward and back, left foot forward and back,
+      both feet forward and back in a sort of double shuffle; more wax, more
+      vigorous polishing, more singing, with longer pauses for breath. &ldquo;'Knowest
+      thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'&rdquo; he bellowed&mdash;sprinkle of
+      wax, right foot, left foot, any foot at all. Now and then he took the
+      score from his pocket and pored over it, humming the air, raising his
+      eyebrows over the high notes, dropping his chin to the low ones. It was a
+      wonderful morning. Between greetings to neighbors he sang&mdash;a bit of
+      talk, a bit of song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Kennst du das Land'&mdash;Good-morning, sir&mdash;the old Rax wears a
+      crown. It will snow soon. 'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen'&mdash;Ah,
+      madam the milk Frau, and are the cows frozen up to-day like the pump? No?
+      Marvelous! Dost thou know that to-night is Mignon at the Opera, and that
+      the Engel sings? 'Kennst du das Land'&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At eleven came Rosa with her husband, the soldier from Salzburg with one
+      lung. He was having a holiday from his sentry duty at the hospital, and
+      the one lung seemed to be a libel, for while the women had coffee together
+      and a bit of mackerel he sang a very fair bass to the Portier's tenor.
+      Together they pored over the score, and even on their way to the beer hall
+      hummed together such bits as they recalled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On one point they differed. The score was old and soiled with much
+      thumbing. At one point, destroyed long since, the sentry sang A sharp: the
+      Portier insisted on A natural. They argued together over three Steins of
+      beer; the waiter, referred to, decided for A flat. It was a serious matter
+      to have one's teeth set, as one may say, for a natural and then to be
+      shocked with an unexpected half-tone up or down! It destroyed the
+      illusion; it disappointed; it hurt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sentry stuck to the sharp&mdash;it was sung so at the Salzburg opera.
+      The Portier snapped his thumb at the Salzburg opera. Things were looking
+      serious; they walked back to the locale in silence. The sentry coughed.
+      Possibly there was something, after all, in the one-lung rumor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then that the Portier remembered Harmony. She would know; perhaps
+      she had the score.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was having a bad morning. She had slept little until dawn, and
+      Peter's stealthy closing of the outer door had wakened her by its very
+      caution. After that there had been no more sleep. She had sat up in bed
+      with her chin in her hands and thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the pitiless dawn, with no Peter to restore her to cheerfulness, things
+      looked black, indeed. To what had she fallen, that first one man and then
+      another must propose marriage to her to save her. To save her from what?
+      From what people thought, or&mdash;each from the other?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Were men so evil that they never trusted each other? McLean had frankly
+      distrusted Peter, had said so. Or could it be that there was something
+      about her, something light and frivolous? She had been frivolous. She
+      always laughed at Peter's foolishnesses. Perhaps that was it. That was it.
+      They were afraid for her. She had thrown herself on Peter's hands&mdash;almost
+      into his arms. She had made this situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She must get away, of course. If only she had some one to care for Jimmy
+      until Peter returned! But there was no one. The Portier's wife was fond of
+      Jimmy, but not skillful. And suppose he were to wake in the night and call
+      for her and she would not come. She cried a little over this. After a time
+      she pattered across the room in her bare feet and got from a bureau drawer
+      the money she had left. There was not half enough to take her home. She
+      could write; the little mother might get some for her, but at infinite
+      cost, infinite humiliation. That would have to be a final, desperate
+      resort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt a little more cheerful when she had had a cup of coffee. Jimmy
+      wakened about that time, and she went through the details of his morning
+      toilet with all the brightness she could assume&mdash;bath blankets, warm
+      bath, toenails, finger-nails, fresh nightgown, fresh sheets, and&mdash;final
+      touch of all&mdash;a real barber's part straight from crown to brow. After
+      that ten minutes under extra comforters while the room aired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hung over the boy that morning in an agony of tenderness&mdash;he was
+      so little, so frail, and she must leave him. Only one thing sustained her.
+      The boy loved her, but it was Peter he idolized. When he had Peter he
+      needed nothing else. In some curious process of his childish mind Peter
+      and Daddy mingled in inextricable confusion. More than once he had
+      recalled events in the roving life he and his father had led.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You remember that, don't you?&rdquo; he would say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly I remember,&rdquo; Peter would reply heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That evening on the steamer when I ate so many raisins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. And were ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not ill&mdash;not that time. But you said I'd make a good pudding! You
+      remember that, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Peter would recall it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter would be left. That was the girl's comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a beginning at gathering her things together that morning, while
+      the boy dozed and the white mice scurried about the little cage. She could
+      not take her trunk, or Peter would trace it. She would have to carry her
+      belongings, a few at a time, to wherever she found a room. Then when Peter
+      came back she could slip away and he would never find her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At noon came the Portier and the sentry, now no longer friends, and rang
+      the doorbell. Harmony was rather startled. McLean and Mrs. Boyer had been
+      her only callers, and she did not wish to see either of them. But after a
+      second ring she gathered her courage in her hands and opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned pale when she saw the sentry in his belted blue-gray tunic and
+      high cap. She thought, of course, that Jimmy had been traced and that now
+      he would be taken away. If the sentry knew her, however, he kept his face
+      impassive and merely touched his cap. The Portier stated their errand.
+      Harmony's face cleared. She even smiled as the Portier extended to her the
+      thumbed score with its missing corner. What, after all, does it matter
+      which was right&mdash;whether it was A sharp or A natural? What really
+      matters is that Harmony, having settled the dispute and clinched the
+      decision by running over the score for a page or two, turned to find the
+      Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on paunch, enjoying a
+      delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where,
+      taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders back,
+      arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with amazing
+      rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the little boy
+      in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth, and eyes
+      seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with one another.
+      When all was over&mdash;perhaps when his repertoire was exhausted&mdash;the
+      sentry returned his nose to the center of his face, replaced eyes and
+      mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton handkerchief. Then, still
+      in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving the youngster enraptured,
+      staring at the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the higher
+      part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were many unpretentious
+      buildings. She had hunted board there and she knew. It was far from the
+      Stadt, far from the fashionable part of town, a neighborhood of small
+      shops, of frank indigence. There surely she could find a room, and perhaps
+      in one of the small stores what she failed to secure in the larger, a
+      position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's wife to
+      sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking about for a
+      room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small and wretchedly
+      furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap dressmaker. The approach
+      was forbidding enough. One entered a cavelike, cobble-paved court under
+      the building, filled with wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and swearing
+      teamsters. From the side a stone staircase took off and led, twisting from
+      one landing cave to another, to the upper floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of sewing-machines,
+      the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a home but a hiding-place,
+      took the room at once. She was asked for no reference. In a sort of agony
+      lest this haven fail her she paid for a week in advance. The wooden bed,
+      the cracked mirror over the table, even the pigeons outside on the
+      windowsill were hers for a week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have it cleaned,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;I have been so busy: the
+      masquerade season is on. The Fraulein is American, is she not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One knows the Americans. They are chic, not like the English. I have some
+      American customers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony started. The dressmaker was shrewd. Many people hid in the
+      sixteenth district. She hastened to reassure the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will not disturb you. And just now I have but one, a dancer. I shall
+      have the room cleaned. Good-bye, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So far, good. She had a refuge now, one spot that the venom of scandal
+      could not poison, where she could study and work&mdash;work hard, although
+      there could be no more lessons&mdash;one spot where Peter would not have
+      to protect her, where Peter, indeed, would never find her. This thought,
+      which should have brought comfort, brought only new misery. Peace seemed
+      dearly bought all at once; shabby, wholesome, hearty Peter, with his rough
+      hair and quiet voice, his bulging pockets and steady eyes&mdash;she was
+      leaving Peter forever, exchanging his companionship for that of a row of
+      pigeons on a window-sill. He would find some one, of course; but who would
+      know that he liked toast made hard and plenty of butter, or to leave his
+      bed-clothing loose at the foot, Peter being very long and apt to lop over?
+      The lopping over brought a tear or two. A very teary and tragic young
+      heroine, this Harmony, prone to go about for the last day or two with a
+      damp little handkerchief tucked in her sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt her way down the staircase and into the cave below. Fate hangs by
+      a very slender thread sometimes. If a wagon had not lumbered by as she
+      reached the lowest step, so that she must wait and thus had time to lower
+      her veil, she would have been recognized at once by the little Georgiev,
+      waiting to ascend. But the wagon was there, Harmony lowered her veil, the
+      little Georgiev, passing a veiled young woman in the gloom, went up the
+      staircase with even pulses and calm and judicial bearing, up to the tiny
+      room a floor or two below Harmony's, where he wrote reports to the
+      Minister of War and mixed them with sonnets&mdash;to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony went back to the Siebensternstrasse, having accomplished what she
+      had set out to do and being very wretched in consequence. Because she was
+      leaving the boy so soon she strove to atone for her coming defection by
+      making it a gala evening. The child was very happy. She tucked him up in
+      the salon, lighted all the candles, served him the daintiest of suppers
+      there. She brought in the mice and tied tiny bows on their necks; she
+      played checkers with him while the supper dishes waited, and went down to
+      defeat in three hilarious games; and last of all she played to him, joyous
+      music at first, then slower, drowsier airs, until his heavy head dropped
+      on his shoulder and she gathered him up in tender arms and carried him to
+      bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was dawn when Marie arrived. Harmony was sleeping soundly when the bell
+      rang. Her first thought was that Peter had come back&mdash;but Peter
+      carried a key. The bell rang again, and she slipped on the old kimono and
+      went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it Peter?&rdquo; she called, hand on knob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come from Peter. I have a letter,&rdquo; in German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not know me&mdash;Marie Jedlicka. Please let me come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bewildered, Harmony opened the door, and like a gray ghost Marie slipped
+      by her and into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a gaslight burning very low; Harmony turned it up and faced her
+      visitor. She recognized her at once&mdash;the girl Dr. Stewart had been
+      with in the coffee-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something has happened to Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. He is well. He sent this to the Fraulein Wells.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Fraulein Wells.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie held out the letter and staggered. Harmony put her in a chair; she
+      was bewildered, almost frightened. Crisis of some sort was written on
+      Marie's face. Harmony felt very young, very incapable. The other girl
+      refused coffee, would not even go into the salon until Peter's letter had
+      been read. She was a fugitive, a criminal; the Austrian law is severe to
+      those that harbor criminals. Let Harmony read:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DEAR HARRY,&mdash;Will you forgive me for this and spread the wings of
+      your splendid charity over this poor child? Perhaps I am doing wrong in
+      sending her to you, but just now it is all I can think of. If she wants to
+      talk let her talk. It will probably help her. Also feed her, will you? And
+      if she cannot sleep, give her one of the blue powders I fixed for Jimmy.
+      I'll be back later to-day if I can make it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;PETER&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony glanced up from the letter. Marie sat drooping in her chair. Her
+      eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her at once, but any
+      surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in Peter's apartment was
+      sunk in a general apathy, a compound of nervous reaction and fatigue.
+      During the long hours in the express she had worn herself out with fright
+      and remorse: there was nothing left now but exhaustion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold kitchen
+      and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she could in the
+      salon, and then went into her room to dress. There she read the letter
+      again, and wondered if Peter had gone through life like this, picking up
+      waifs and strays and shouldering their burdens for them. Decidedly, life
+      with Peter was full of surprises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remembered, as she hurried into her clothes; the boys' club back in
+      America and the spelling-matches. Decidedly, also, Peter was an
+      occupation, a state of mind, a career. No musician, hoping for a career of
+      her own, could possibly marry Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a curious morning in the old lodge of Maria Theresa, while
+      Stewart in the Pension Waldheim struggled back to consciousness, while
+      Peter sat beside him and figured on an old envelope the problem of
+      dividing among four enough money to support one, while McLean ate his
+      heart out in wretchedness in his hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie told her story over the early breakfast, sitting with her thin
+      elbows on the table, her pointed chin in her palms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now I am sorry,&rdquo; she finished. &ldquo;It has done no good. If it had only
+      killed her but she was not much hurt. I saw her rise and bend over him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was silent. She had no stock of aphorisms for the situation, no
+      worldly knowledge, only pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did Peter say he would recover?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. They will both recover and go to America. And he will marry her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps Harmony would have been less comfortable, Marie less frank, had
+      Marie realized that this establishment of Peter's was not on the same
+      basis as Stewart's had been, or had Harmony divined her thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The presence of the boy was discovered by his waking. Marie was taken in
+      and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a
+      marvelous people&mdash;to have taken into their house and their hearts
+      this strange child&mdash;if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little
+      slum mind was not certain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the safety and comfort of the little apartment the Viennese expanded,
+      cheered. She devoted herself to the boy, telling him strange folk tales,
+      singing snatches of songs for him. The youngster took a liking to her at
+      once. It seemed to Harmony, going about her morning routine, that Marie
+      was her solution and Peter's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the afternoon she took a package to the branch post-office and
+      mailed it by parcel-post to the Wollbadgasse. On the way she met Mrs.
+      Boyer face to face. That lady looked severely ahead, and Harmony passed
+      her with her chin well up and the eyes of a wounded animal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean sent a great box of flowers that day. She put them, for lack of a
+      vase, in a pitcher beside Jimmy's bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At dusk a telegram came to say that Stewart was better and that Peter was
+      on his way down to Vienna. He would arrive at eight. Time was very short
+      now&mdash;seconds flashed by, minutes galloped. Harmony stewed a chicken
+      for supper, and creamed the breast for Jimmy. She fixed the table, flowers
+      in the center, the best cloth, Peter's favorite cheese. Six o'clock,
+      six-thirty, seven; Marie was telling Jimmy a fairy tale and making the
+      fairies out of rosebuds. The studylamp was lighted, the stove glowing,
+      Peter's slippers were out, his old smoking-coat, his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quarter past seven. Peter would be near Vienna now and hungry. If he
+      could only eat his supper before he learned&mdash;but that was impossible.
+      He would come in, as he always did, and slam the outer door, and open it
+      again to close it gently, as he always did, and then he would look for
+      her, going from room to room until he found her&mdash;only to-night he
+      would not find her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not say good-bye to Jimmy. She stood in the doorway and said a
+      little prayer for him. Marie had made the flower fairies on needles, and
+      they stood about his head on the pillow&mdash;pink and yellow and white
+      elves with fluffy skirts. Then, very silently, she put on her hat and
+      jacket and closed the outer door behind her. In the courtyard she turned
+      and looked up. The great chandelier in the salon was not lighted, but from
+      the casement windows shone out the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter had had many things to think over during the ride down the
+      mountains. He had the third-class compartment to himself, and sat in a
+      corner, soft hat over his eyes. Life had never been particularly simple to
+      Peter&mdash;his own life, yes; a matter of three meals a day&mdash;he had
+      had fewer&mdash;a roof, clothing. But other lives had always touched him
+      closely, and at the contact points Peter glowed, fused, amalgamated. Thus
+      he had been many people&mdash;good, indifferent, bad, but all needy. Thus,
+      also, Peter had committed vicarious crimes, suffered vicarious illnesses,
+      starved, died, loved&mdash;vicariously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, after years of living for others, Peter was living at last for
+      himself&mdash;and suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that he understood exactly what ailed him. He thought he was tired,
+      which was true enough, having had little sleep for two or three nights.
+      Also he explained to himself that he was smoking too much, and resolutely&mdash;lighted
+      another cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two things had revealed Peter's condition to himself: McLean had said:
+      &ldquo;You are crazy in love with her.&rdquo; McLean's statement, lacking subtlety,
+      had had a certain quality of directness. Even then Peter, utterly
+      miserable, had refused to capitulate, when to capitulate would have meant
+      the surrender of the house in the Siebensternstrasse. And the absence from
+      Harmony had shown him just where he stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with
+      it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly it
+      was, this love. Even if Harmony cared&mdash;and at the mere thought his
+      heart pounded&mdash;what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her
+      to accept the half of&mdash;nothing, to give up a career to share his
+      struggle for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty
+      under a bushel that he might wave aloft his feeble light!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was no way out, no royal road to fortune by the route he had
+      chosen; nothing but grinding work, with a result problematical and years
+      ahead. There were even no legacies to expect, he thought whimsically.
+      Peter had known a chap once, struggling along in gynecology, who had had a
+      fortune left him by a G. P., which being interpreted is Grateful Patient.
+      Peter's patients had a way of living, and when they did drop out, as
+      happened now and then, had also a way of leaving Peter an unpaid bill in
+      token of appreciation; Peter had even occasionally helped to bury them, by
+      way, he defended himself, of covering up his mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, sitting back in his corner, allowed the wonderful scenery to slip
+      by unnoticed. He put Harmony the Desirable out of his mind, and took to
+      calculating on a scrap of paper what could be done for Harmony the
+      Musician. He could hold out for three months, he calculated, and still
+      have enough to send Harmony home and to get home himself on a slow boat.
+      The Canadian lines were cheap. If Jimmy lived perhaps he could take him
+      along: if not&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would have to put six months' work in the next three. That was not so
+      hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived on it. Also
+      there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in the salon propped in a
+      chair and Harmony playing, the room dark save for the glow from the stove
+      and for the one candle at Harmony's elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All roads lead to Rome. Peter's thoughts, having traveled in a circle,
+      were back again to Harmony the Desirable&mdash;Harmony playing in the
+      firelight, Harmony Hushed over the brick stove, Harmony paring potatoes
+      that night in the kitchen when he&mdash;Harmony! Harmony!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart knew all about the accident and its cause. Peter had surmised as
+      much when the injured man failed to ask for Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tested him finally by bringing Marie's name into the conversation.
+      Stewart ignored it, accepted her absence, refused to be drawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was at first. During the day, however, as he gained strength, he grew
+      restless and uneasy. As the time approached for Peter to leave, he was
+      clearly struggling with himself. The landlady had agreed to care for him
+      and was bustling about the room. During one of her absences he turned to
+      Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose Marie hasn't been round?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She came back last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she tell you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, poor child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a devil!&rdquo; Stewart said, and lay silent. Then: &ldquo;I saw her shoot that
+      thing out in front of us, but there was no time&mdash;Where is she now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marie? I sent her to Vienna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart fell back, relieved, not even curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank Heaven for that!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I don't want to see her again. I'd do
+      something I'd be sorry for. The kindest thing to say for her is that she
+      was not sane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Peter gravely, &ldquo;she was hardly sane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart caught his steady gaze and glanced away. For him Marie's little
+      tragedy had been written and erased. He would forget it magnanimously. He
+      had divided what he had with her, and she had repaid him by attempting his
+      life. And not only his life, but Anita's. Peter followed his line of
+      reasoning easily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite a frequent complication, Stewart,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but every man to
+      whom it happens regards himself more or less as a victim. She fell in love
+      with you, that's all. Her conduct is contrary to the ethics of the game,
+      but she's been playing poor cards all along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That doesn't matter, does it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart had lain back and closed his eyes. No, it didn't matter. A sense
+      of great relief overwhelmed him. Marie was gone, frightened into hiding.
+      It was as if a band that had been about him was suddenly loosed: he
+      breathed deep, he threw out his arms and laughed from sheer reaction.
+      Then, catching Peter's not particularly approving eyes, he colored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord, Peter!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you don't know what I've gone through with
+      that little devil. And now she's gone!&rdquo; He glanced round the disordered
+      room, where bandages and medicines crowded toilet articles on the
+      dressing-table, where one of Marie's small slippers still lay where it had
+      fallen under the foot of the bed, where her rosary still hung over the
+      corner of the table. &ldquo;Ring for the maid, Peter, will you! I've got to get
+      this junk out of here. Some of Anita's people may come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During that afternoon ride, while the train clump-clumped down the
+      mountains, Peter thought of all this. Some of Marie's &ldquo;junk&rdquo; was in his
+      bag; her rosary lay in his breastpocket, along with the pin he had sent
+      her at Christmas. Peter happened on it, still in its box, which looked as
+      if it had been cried over. He had brought it with him. He admired it very
+      much, and it had cost money he could ill afford to spend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late when the train drew into the station. Peter, encumbered with
+      Marie's luggage and his own, lowered his window and added his voice to the
+      chorus of plaintive calls: &ldquo;Portier! Portier!&rdquo; they shouted. &ldquo;Portier!&rdquo;
+       bawled Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was obliged to resort to the extravagance of a taxicab. Possibly a
+      fiacre would have done as well, but it cost almost as much and was slower.
+      Moments counted now: a second was an hour, an hour a decade. For he was on
+      his way to Harmony. Extravagance became recklessness. As soon die for a
+      sheep as a lamb! He stopped the taxicab and bought a bunch of violets,
+      stopped again and bought lilies of the valley to combine with the violets,
+      went out of his way to the American grocery and bought a jar of preserved
+      fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By that time he was laden. The jar of preserves hung in one shabby pocket,
+      Marie's rosary dangled from another; the violets were buttoned under his
+      overcoat against the cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the very last he held the taxi an extra moment and darted into the
+      delicatessen shop across the Siebensternstrasse. From there, standing
+      inside the doorway, he could see the lights in the salon across the way,
+      the glow of his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. Peter whistled,
+      stamped his cold feet, quite neglected&mdash;in spite of repeated warnings
+      from Harmony&mdash;to watch the Herr Schenkenkaufer weigh the cheese,
+      accepted without a glance a ten-Kronen piece with a hole in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how is the child to-day?&rdquo; asked the Herr Schenkenkaufer, covering the
+      defective gold piece with conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know; I have been away,&rdquo; said Peter. He almost sang it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All is well or I would have heard. Wilhelm the Portier was but just now
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All well, of course,&rdquo; sang Peter, eyes on the comfortable Floor of his
+      lamp, the flicker that was the fire. &ldquo;Auf wiedersehen, Herr
+      Schenkenkaufer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Auf wiedersehen, Herr Doktor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Violets, lilies-of-the-valley, cheese, rosary, luggage&mdash;thus Peter
+      climbed the stairs. The Portier wished to assist him, but Peter declined.
+      The Portier was noisy. There was to be a moment when Peter, having
+      admitted himself with extreme caution, would present himself without so
+      much as a creak to betray him, would stand in a doorway until some one,
+      Harmony perhaps&mdash;ah, Peter!&mdash;would turn and see him. She had a
+      way of putting one slender hand over her heart when she was startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter put down the jar of preserved peaches outside. It was to be a second
+      surprise. Also he put down the flowers; they were to be brought in last of
+      all. One surprise after another is a cumulative happiness. Peter did not
+      wish to swallow all his cake in one bite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For once he did not slam the outer door, although he very nearly did, and
+      only caught it at the cost of a bruised finger. Inside he listened. There
+      was no clatter of dishes, no scurrying back and forth from table to stove
+      in the final excitement of dishing up. There was, however, a highly
+      agreeable odor of stewing chicken, a crisp smell of baking biscuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the darkened hall Peter had to pause to steady himself. For he had a
+      sudden mad impulse to shout Harmony's name, to hold out his arms, to call
+      her to him there in the warm darkness, and when she had come, to catch her
+      to him, to tell his love in one long embrace, his arms about her, his
+      rough cheek against her soft one. No wonder he grew somewhat dizzy and had
+      to pull himself together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence rather surprised him, until he recalled that Harmony was
+      probably sewing in the salon, as she did sometimes when dinner was ready
+      to serve. The boy was asleep, no doubt. He stole along on tiptoe, hardly
+      breathing, to the first doorway, which was Jimmy's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was asleep. Round him were the pink and yellow and white flower
+      fairies with violet heads. Peter saw them and smiled. Then, his eyes
+      growing accustomed to the light, he saw Marie, face down on the floor, her
+      head on her arms. Still as she was, Peter knew she was not sleeping, only
+      fighting her battle over again and losing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the joyousness of his return fled from Peter, never to come back.
+      The two silent figures were too close to tragedy. Peter, with a long
+      breath, stole past the door and on to the salon. No Harmony there, but the
+      great room was warm and cheery. The table was drawn near the stove and
+      laid for Abendessen. The white porcelain coffee-pot had boiled and
+      extinguished itself, according to its method, and now gently steamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted but burning
+      low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little money&mdash;almost
+      all he had left Harmony when he went away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
+      discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the rooms
+      revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at last the fact
+      stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter refused to accept it. He
+      sat for a half-hour or even more by the fire in the salon, obstinately
+      refusing to believe she was gone, keeping the supper warm against her
+      return. He did not think or reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing,
+      hardly moving, save when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he
+      was all alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
+      outer door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by alarm. During
+      all the time that followed, that condition persisted, fright, almost
+      terror. Harmony alone in the city, helpless, dependent, poverty-stricken.
+      Harmony seeking employment under conditions Peter knew too well. But with
+      his alarm came rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
+      gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the frightened
+      Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation after accusation
+      against some unnamed woman to whom he applied epithets that Marie's
+      English luckily did not comprehend. Not a particularly heroic figure was
+      Peter that night: a frantic, disheveled individual, before whom the
+      Portier cowered, who struggled back to sanity through a berserk haze and
+      was liable to swift relapses into fury again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be Peter's for
+      many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim determination to keep on
+      searching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the cabstands in
+      the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The delicatessen seller had
+      seen her go out that afternoon with a bundle and return without it. She
+      had been gone only an hour or so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that she
+      might have found a haven in the neighborhood&mdash;until he recalled the
+      parcel-post.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief, but she had
+      also offered the girl a home. She might be at the Boyers'. Peter, flinging
+      on a hat and without his overcoat, went to the Boyers'. Time was valuable,
+      and he had wasted an hour, two hours, in useless rage. So he took a
+      taxicab, and being by this time utterly reckless of cost let it stand
+      while he interviewed the Boyers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring. Peter was
+      past explanation or ceremonial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is Harmony here?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harmony?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. &ldquo;I don't
+      know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the bedroom, and
+      for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter suffered the tortures of
+      the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had meant to say by way of protest at the
+      intrusion on the sacred privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died in her
+      throat. Her plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps with
+      guilt. Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet story;
+      Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her unstayed
+      figure, listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; finished Peter, &ldquo;that since you had offered her a refuge&mdash;from
+      me&mdash;she might have come here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I offered her a refuge&mdash;before I had been to the Pension Schwarz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Peter slowly. &ldquo;And what about the Pension Schwarz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am obliged to
+      say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the girl come here I
+      could hardly&mdash;Frank, I will speak!&mdash;I could hardly have taken
+      her in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling out into
+      the hall again. There he thought of something to say in reply,
+      repudiation, thought better of it, started down the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he put his
+      hand on Peter's shoulder. &ldquo;You know, old man, I don't believe that. These
+      women&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said Peter simply. &ldquo;Thank you. Good-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean, from Mrs.
+      Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing herself, to cutting the
+      threads that bound her to the life in the Siebensternstrasse. She had
+      drawn all her money, as Peter discovered later. The discovery caused him
+      even more acute anxiety. The city was full of thieves; poverty and its
+      companion, crime, lurked on every shadowy staircase of the barracklike
+      houses, or peered, red-eyed, from every alleyway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And into this city of contrasts&mdash;of gray women of the night hugging
+      gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with loathsome gestures, of
+      smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths under great mustaches, of dapper
+      soldiers to whom the young girl unattended was potential prey, into this
+      night city of terror, this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine rubbing
+      elbows with frost-nipped flesh, destitution sauntering along the
+      fashionable Prater for lack of shelter, gilt wheels of royalty and yellow
+      wheels of courtesans&mdash;Harmony had ventured alone for the second time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this time there was no Peter Byrne to accost her cheerily in the
+      twilight and win her by sheer friendliness. She was alone. Her funds were
+      lower, much lower. And something else had gone&mdash;her faith. Mrs. Boyer
+      had seen to that. In the autumn Harmony had faced the city clear-eyed and
+      unafraid; now she feared it, met it with averted eyes, alas! understood
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not the Harmony who had bade a brave farewell to Scatchy and the
+      Big Soprano in the station who fled to her refuge on the upper floor of
+      the house in the Wollbadgasse. This was a hunted creature, alternately
+      flushed and pale, who locked her door behind her before she took off her
+      hat, and who, having taken off her hat and surveyed her hiding-place with
+      tragic eyes, fell suddenly to trembling, alone there in the gaslight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had had no plans beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to think
+      the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing to eat, and the
+      single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no German. The dressmaker
+      had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not know where to find a restaurant,
+      was afraid to trust herself to the streets alone. She went to bed
+      supperless, with a tiny picture of Peter and Jimmy and the wooden sentry
+      under her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pigeons, cooing on the window-sill, wakened her early. She was
+      confused at first, got up to see if Jimmy had thrown off his blankets, and
+      wakened to full consciousness with the sickening realization that Jimmy
+      was not there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dressmaker, whose name was Monia Reiff, slept late after her evening
+      out. Harmony, collapsing with hunger and faintness, waited as long as she
+      could. Then she put on her things desperately and ventured out. Surely at
+      this hour Peter would not be searching, and even if he were he would never
+      think of the sixteenth district. He would make inquiries, of course&mdash;the
+      Pension Schwarz, Boyers', the master's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The breakfast brought back her strength and the morning air gave her
+      confidence. The district, too, was less formidable than the neighborhood
+      of the Karntnerstrasse and the Graben. The shops were smaller. The windows
+      exhibited cheaper goods. There was a sort of family atmosphere about many
+      of them; the head of the establishment in the doorway, the wife at the
+      cashier's desk, daughters, cousins, nieces behind the wooden counters. The
+      shopkeepers were approachable, instead of familiar. Harmony met no
+      rebuffs, was respectfully greeted and cheerfully listened to. In many
+      cases the application ended in a general consultation, shopkeeper, wife,
+      daughters, nieces, slim clerks with tiny mustaches. She got addresses,
+      followed them up, more consultations, more addresses, but no work. The
+      reason dawned on her after a day of tramping, during which she kept
+      carefully away from that part of the city where Peter might be searching
+      for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact was, of course, that her knowledge of English was her sole asset
+      as a clerk. And there were few English and no tourists in the sixteenth
+      district. She was marketing a commodity for which there was no demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lunched at a Konditorei, more to rest her tired body than because she
+      needed food. The afternoon was as the morning. At six o'clock, long after
+      the midwinter darkness had fallen, she stumbled back to the Wollbadgasse
+      and up the whitewashed staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a shock at the second landing. A man had stepped into the angle to
+      let her pass. A gasjet dared over his head, and she recognized the short
+      heavy figure and ardent eyes of Georgiev. She had her veil down luckily,
+      and he gave no sign of recognition. She passed on, and she heard him a
+      second later descending. But there had been something reminiscent after
+      all in her figure and carriage. The little Georgiev paused, halfway down,
+      and thought a moment. It was impossible, of course. All women reminded him
+      of the American. Had he not, only the day before, followed for two city
+      blocks a woman old enough to be his mother, merely because she carried a
+      violin case? But there was something about the girl he had just passed&mdash;Bah!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bad week for Harmony followed, a week of weary days and restless nights
+      when she slept only to dream of Peter&mdash;of his hurt and incredulous
+      eyes when he found she had gone; of Jimmy&mdash;that he needed her, was
+      worse, was dying. More than once she heard him sobbing and wakened to the
+      cooing of the pigeons on the window-sill. She grew thin and sunken-eyed;
+      took to dividing her small hoard, half of it with her, half under the
+      carpet, so that in case of accident all would not be gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, as it happened, was serious. One day, the sixth, she came back wet
+      to the skin from an all-day rain, to find that the carpet bank had been
+      looted. There was no clue. The stolid Hungarian, startled out of her
+      lethargy, protested innocence; the little dressmaker, who seemed honest
+      and friendly, wept in sheer sympathy. The fact remained&mdash;half the
+      small hoard was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two days more, a Sunday and a Monday. On Sunday Harmony played, and
+      Georgiev in the room below, translating into cipher a recent conference
+      between the Austrian Minister of War and the German Ambassador, put aside
+      his work and listened. She played, as once before she had played when life
+      seemed sad and tragic, the &ldquo;Humoresque.&rdquo; Georgiev, hands behind his head
+      and eyes upturned, was back in the Pension Schwarz that night months ago
+      when Harmony played the &ldquo;Humoresque&rdquo; and Peter stooped outside her door.
+      The little Bulgarian sighed and dreamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, a little sadder, a little more forlorn each day, pursued her
+      hopeless quest. She ventured into the heart of the Stadt and paid a part
+      of her remaining money to an employment bureau, to teach English or
+      violin, whichever offered, or even both. After she had paid they told her
+      it would be difficult, almost impossible without references. She had
+      another narrow escape as she was leaving. She almost collided with Olga,
+      the chambermaid, who, having clashed for the last time with Katrina, was
+      seeking new employment. On another occasion she saw Marie in the crowd and
+      was obsessed with a longing to call to her, to ask for Peter, for Jimmy.
+      That meeting took the heart out of the girl. Marie was white and weary&mdash;perhaps
+      the boy was worse. Perhaps Peter&mdash;Her heart contracted. But that was
+      absurd, of course, Peter was always well and strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two things occurred that week, one unexpected, the other inevitable. The
+      unexpected occurrence was that Monia Reiff, finding Harmony being pressed
+      for work, offered the girl a situation. The wage was small, but she could
+      live on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inevitable was that she met Georgiev on the stairs without her veil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first day in the workroom. The apprentices were carrying home
+      boxes for a ball that night. Thread was needed, and quickly. Harmony, who
+      did odds and ends of sewing, was most easily spared. She slipped on her
+      jacket and hat and ran down to the shop near by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the return that she met Georgiev coming down. The afternoon was
+      dark and the staircase unlighted. In the gloom one face was as another.
+      Georgiev, listening intently, hearing footsteps, drew back into the
+      embrasure of a window and waited. His swarthy face was tense, expectant.
+      As the steps drew near, were light feminine instead of stealthy, the
+      little spy relaxed somewhat. But still he waited, crouched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a second before he recognized Harmony, another instant before he
+      realized his good fortune. She had almost passed. He put out an unsteady
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Herr Georgiev!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes gleamed. He
+      struggled against the barrier of language, broke out in passionate Bulgar,
+      switched to German punctuated with an English word here and there. Made
+      intelligible, it was that he had found her at last. Harmony held her
+      spools of thread and waited for the storm of languages to subside. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony colored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am&mdash;am hiding,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;Something very uncomfortable
+      happened and I came here. Please don't say you have seen me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly, with his
+      ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed of course. His
+      incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had actually been in the
+      same building with him while he sought her everywhere else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;it was you who played Sunday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I surely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall meet again, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein,&mdash;with all respect,&mdash;sometime perhaps you will walk
+      out with me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very busy all day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect, Fraulein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was touched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometime,&rdquo; she consented. And then impulsively: &ldquo;I am very lonely, Herr
+      Georgiev.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and kissed it
+      reverently. The Herr Georgiev's father was a nobleman in his own country,
+      and all the little spy's training had been to make of a girl in Harmony's
+      situation lawful prey. But in the spy's glowing heart there was nothing
+      for Harmony to fear. She knew it. He stood, hat in hand, while she went up
+      the staircase. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein!&rdquo; anxiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours hat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw no one there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows, listened
+      until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he clapped his hat on
+      his head and made his cautious way down to the street. There was no man in
+      a green velours hat below, but the little spy had an uneasy feeling that
+      eyes watched him, nevertheless. Life was growing complicated for the Herr
+      Georgiev.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a life she had
+      never touched before. She discovered, after a day or two in the work-room,
+      that Monia Reiff's business lay almost altogether among the demi-monde.
+      The sewing-girls, of Marie's type many of them, found in the customers
+      endless topics of conversation. Some things Harmony was spared, much of
+      the talk being in dialect. But a great deal of it she understood, and she
+      learned much that was not spoken. They talked freely of the women, their
+      clothes, and they talked a great deal about a newcomer, an American
+      dancer, for whom Monia was making an elaborate outfit. The American's name
+      was Lillian Le Grande. She was dancing at one of the variety theaters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman&mdash;a gold
+      brocade slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of bodice made
+      of gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with Georgiev she met her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping. Monia,
+      flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and glanced over the
+      girls. She singled out Harmony finally and called her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and put on the American's gown,&rdquo; she ordered. &ldquo;She wishes&mdash;Heaven
+      knows what she wishes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein Le Grande
+      had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when she found herself
+      obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one terrible moment before the
+      little dressmaker's amused eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou art very lovely, very chic,&rdquo; said Monia. The dress added to rather
+      than relieved Harmony's discomfiture. She donned it in one of the
+      fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining off a corner of
+      the large reception room. The slashed skirt embarrassed her; the low cut
+      made her shrink. Monia was frankly entranced. Above the gold tissue of the
+      bodice rose Harmony's exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold; even her
+      eyes looked golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave a pull
+      here, a pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the things she
+      made!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind the
+      curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit more of the
+      girl's rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the curtain aside and
+      stood smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second's silence. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exquisite!&rdquo; she said in English. Then in halting German: &ldquo;Do not change a
+      line. It is perfect.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a glimpse of
+      herself and was startled. She had been wearing black for so long, and now
+      this radiant golden creature was herself. She was enchanted and abashed.
+      The slash in the skirt troubled her: her slender leg had a way of
+      revealing itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered another
+      gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the dress and into her
+      own shabby frock. On the other side of the curtain the dancer was talking.
+      Her voice was loud, but rather agreeable. She smoked a cigarette. Scraps
+      of chatter came to Harmony, and once a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is too pink&mdash;something more delicate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still no news, Fraulein?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn't so bad, is it? I could use
+      more rouge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child could be
+      stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became nasal,
+      full of venom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, they know well enough,&rdquo; she snapped. &ldquo;Those nurses know, and there's
+      a pig of a red-bearded doctor&mdash;I'd like to poison him. Separating
+      mother and child! I'm going to find him, if only to show them they are not
+      so smart after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her curtain, had
+      clutched at her heart. Jimmy's mother!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony's flight had had nothing to do
+      with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and
+      besides Peter had indicated that Harmony's absence was purely temporary.
+      But the breaking-up was inevitable. All day long the child lay in the
+      white bed, apathetic but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies for
+      his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite tame, played hide-and-seek
+      over the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his frantic search for
+      Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no
+      apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried obediently to
+      eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg to be taken into
+      the salon, as he once had done. There was a sort of mental confusion also.
+      He liked Marie to read his father's letters; but as he grew weaker the
+      occasional confusing of Peter with his dead father became a fixed idea.
+      Peter was Daddy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony's adjacent room
+      and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he put on
+      his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth sofa at
+      the foot of Jimmy's bed&mdash;lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he that
+      the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its
+      slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in
+      every night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp in
+      his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy's thin little chest.
+      Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the ears and developed
+      lines about his mouth that never left him again. He felt gray and old, and
+      sometimes bitter and hard also. The boy's condition could not be helped:
+      it was inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was eating his heart out
+      had been unnecessary and cruel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he wondered
+      how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he hoped it was
+      bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night, when the lamp
+      burned low and gusts of wind shook the old house, fearful thoughts came to
+      him&mdash;the canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought reason,
+      however. Harmony had been too rational, too sane for such an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean was Peter's great support in those terrible days. He was young and
+      hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to grease the machinery
+      of the police service; McLean could and did. In Berlin Harmony could not
+      have remained hidden for two days. In Vienna, however, it was different.
+      Returns were made to the department, but irregularly. An American music
+      student was missing. There were thousands of American music students in
+      the city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses. McLean offered a reward
+      and followed up innumerable music students.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became old and
+      haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this difference, that
+      with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day. With
+      McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following morning
+      he went to work with renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after all, the
+      iron had not struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a
+      life-and-death matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work. The
+      little household went on methodically. Marie remained; there had seemed
+      nothing else to do. She cooked Peter's food&mdash;what little he would
+      eat; she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept
+      the apartment neat. She was never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed, she
+      seemed to have lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely to
+      Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in spite of
+      his protests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been music and
+      Harmony's soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with
+      Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier had
+      once vibrated in response to Harmony's violin, almost absolute silence now
+      reigned. Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer creaked, and the
+      loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had been silenced out
+      of deference to the sick child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy's mother
+      in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day. McLean had sent
+      him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect that a young
+      girl answering Harmony's description had been seen in the park at
+      Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had gone out
+      together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And it had been as he
+      feared&mdash;a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing
+      her hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak.
+      Then back to the city again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had taken to making a daily round, to the master's, to the Frau
+      Professor Bergmeister's, along the Graben and the Karntnerstrasse, ending
+      up at the Doctors' Club in the faint hope of a letter. Wrath still
+      smouldered deep in Peter; he would not enter a room at the club if Mrs.
+      Boyer sat within. He had had a long hour with Dr. Jennings, and left that
+      cheerful person writhing in abasement. And he had held a stormy interview
+      with the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for a week, and exceedingly
+      nervous, being of the impression from Peter's manner that in the event of
+      Harmony not turning up an American gunboat would sail up the right arm of
+      the Danube and bombard the Pension Schwarz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the city in
+      the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean's elasticity was
+      deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into crowds, had taken on a
+      strained, concentrated look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man's ultrafashionable
+      dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms dangling between his knees, his
+      head down. Their common trouble had drawn the two together, or had drawn
+      McLean close to Peter, as if he recognized that there were degrees in
+      grief and that Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old rage at
+      Peter had died. Harmony's flight had proved the situation as no amount of
+      protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the girl; then he
+      and Peter would start even, and the battle to the best man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since he sat
+      down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted down from day to
+      day such details of their search as might be worth keeping. Now and then
+      he glanced at Peter as if he wished to say something, hesitated, fell to
+      work again over the notebook. Finally he ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How's the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so well to-day. I'm having a couple of men in to see him to-night. He
+      doesn't sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you sleep?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much. He's on my mind, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That and other things, Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think&mdash;wouldn't it be better to have a nurse. You can't go
+      like this all day and be up all night, you know. And Marie has him most of
+      the day.&rdquo; McLean, of course, had known Marie before. &ldquo;The boy ought to
+      have a nurse, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn't move without my hearing him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which exasperation
+      struggled with fatigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord, boy,&rdquo; he rasped, &ldquo;don't you suppose I'd have a nurse if I
+      could afford it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you let me help? I'd like to do something. I'm a useless cub in a
+      sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked in the hospital?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I shouldn't let
+      you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but&mdash;if he would be happier&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's settled, then,&rdquo; said McLean. &ldquo;Nurse Elisabet, if she can come. And&mdash;look
+      here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for a week and haven't had
+      the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it back when you
+      get it, any time, a year or ten years. I'll not miss it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't take anything now,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I'll remember it, and if things
+      get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to live. Marie is a
+      good manager, almost as good as&mdash;Harmony was.&rdquo; This with difficulty.
+      He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat seemed to close on
+      the name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to see
+      Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know, would
+      never notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev, got
+      on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the platform,
+      and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going well with
+      him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face suspiciously,
+      until they came to a rest on Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits
+      he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's
+      despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a
+      touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination,
+      recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension Schwarz&mdash;and
+      built him a little story that was not far from the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade,
+      when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people, when
+      Demel's was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with military
+      men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when the flower
+      women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in roses, when
+      sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the Cathedral, when the
+      lottery did the record business of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might happen
+      on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as in a crowd, with
+      people close, touching her, men staring at her, following her. He had
+      spent a frightful night in the Opera, scanning seat after seat, not so
+      much because he hoped to find her as because inaction was intolerable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the
+      Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He even
+      peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared
+      that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in the
+      early days of the winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because of
+      the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place
+      where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where
+      because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as it
+      passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser's window, where a
+      brilliant light shone on each face that passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the
+      desk spoke of him: &ldquo;He is there again, the gray man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is Russian. Look at his size.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But his shoes!&rdquo; triumphantly. &ldquo;They are American, little one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden
+      rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he is of the police,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;or a spy. There is much talk of
+      war.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such
+      sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rose, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer. The
+      customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange intentness
+      at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious clutch at her
+      heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to fetch the golden
+      rose that was to complete Le Grande's costume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another exit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of
+      Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking
+      along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and steady
+      ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed to
+      her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for her.
+      And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even then
+      he had not said he loved her&mdash;had not even known it, to be exact. Nor
+      had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him out of
+      her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so
+      enlightening as to poor Peter's quest, that Peter was growing thin and
+      white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own
+      position to realize Peter's. With the glimpse of him came a great longing
+      for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy's arms about her neck,
+      for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating harmlessly
+      against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the brick stove,
+      for Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant, at
+      the best, adding to Peter's burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the old
+      situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the
+      respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What
+      if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not
+      let his mother see him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom
+      until eight o'clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked
+      over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had seen
+      him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping watch
+      over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady eyes for
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the
+      sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places.
+      But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her,
+      became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see once
+      again the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp, the flicker that was the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She
+      put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted. She
+      achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car was
+      only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was white
+      and frightened when she reached the car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
+      delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light was
+      burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the money
+      drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
+      the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky, its
+      rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by the gate.
+      Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her. Peter's lamp
+      was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight from the salon
+      windows. The light was not regular&mdash;it disappeared at regular
+      intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some one beyond
+      range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and forward, back and
+      forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always paced the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
+      falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
+      cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower and
+      lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure. No one
+      came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in the
+      wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to the
+      door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of the
+      chain as it was stretched across the door inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's windows&mdash;and
+      Peter's&mdash;opened toward the back of the house, where in a brick-paved
+      courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and where the Portier
+      himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless desire to see at
+      least the light from the child's room possessed Harmony. Even the light
+      would be something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of
+      a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was never
+      locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the spruce tree to
+      the back of the house, it would be something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for her.
+      Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her
+      window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours of
+      night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So Harmony,
+      ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the corner of the
+      old lodge and thus to the courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving
+      shadows; on Jimmy's window-sill a jar of milk. And voices&mdash;some one
+      was singing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to
+      sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little
+      song Harmony had been wont to sing:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes.
+      And in the&mdash;hereafter&mdash;angels may
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Roll&mdash;the&mdash;stone&mdash;from&mdash;its&mdash;grave&mdash;away.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether.
+      Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down the
+      gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a minute,
+      two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks of the
+      Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old city, so
+      very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away.
+      Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood by
+      the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered Harmony
+      somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the night
+      before he went away:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the great
+      tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below. Peter
+      struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated his
+      face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, Peter,&rdquo; whispered Harmony. &ldquo;Good-night, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by relief
+      at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about again, weak
+      naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little less florid. But
+      the week's confinement had given him an opportunity to think over many
+      things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he had packed up the
+      last of Marie's small belongings and sent them down to Vienna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. &ldquo;Just how much talk do you suppose
+      this has made, Byrne?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's brows contracted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she had been
+      so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; doggedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but&mdash;you can't get away with
+      it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and not
+      a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wouldn't understand in a thousand years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea that
+      women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow. A
+      sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a man
+      has done with his life before a girl&mdash;the right girl&mdash;comes into
+      it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life
+      then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she
+      chooses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many would choose under those circumstances?&rdquo; he jibed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter smiled. &ldquo;Quite a few,&rdquo; he said cheerfully. &ldquo;It's a wrong system, of
+      course; but we can get a little truth out of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't get away with it&rdquo; stuck in Stewart's mind for several days. It
+      was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had
+      recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell Anita.
+      In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the affair against
+      his conscience and came out victorious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they
+      complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the
+      bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by midday;
+      and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid citizens, not
+      the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her traveling. In the
+      reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in the valley below the
+      pension with one of the women who wished to take the baths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after
+      the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon's treatment called
+      for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and
+      rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is the
+      remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with any
+      hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and looked
+      haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and
+      mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was quiet,
+      and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita's sitting room, the
+      girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond
+      and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses along
+      a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light was
+      extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train crept
+      out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling from
+      burrow to burrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her there
+      had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were times when
+      an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked into hers
+      with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would glance
+      away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps the
+      situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her by
+      its unusualness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely,
+      without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for
+      something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than
+      ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the thing,
+      of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita, barely
+      twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the world, not so
+      deep as Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would have been
+      merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In that case she
+      might be less than just, or more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech,
+      very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at, keenly
+      alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew not
+      what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully
+      potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger on
+      her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story&mdash;a preamble about
+      his upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna,
+      his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From
+      that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through
+      love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of
+      fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him,
+      this first evening absolutely alone with her. That and her nearness, and
+      the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm. Still he had not touched her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that. General
+      credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first. How
+      many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from
+      chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips
+      last. The woman is in his arms before he tells his love. It is by her
+      response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the
+      thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct.
+      Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl's hand, gained an
+      encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no rebuff
+      would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words? They
+      would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness stood
+      between them and must be painfully taken down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid this is stupid for you,&rdquo; said Anita out of the silence. &ldquo;Would
+      you like to go to the music-room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God forbid. I was thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of what?&rdquo; Encouragement this, surely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really? I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did I stir it up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's hardly the way I meant to put it. You've changed everything for
+      me. I care for you&mdash;a very great deal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he did not
+      touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in this fashion, or
+      was he making love?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm very glad you like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like you!&rdquo; Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice was
+      unmistakable. &ldquo;It's much more than that, Anita, so much more that I'm
+      going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help a little?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, if I can.&rdquo; She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face set and
+      dogged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. There's a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all these
+      places, isn't there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was not an accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send us over
+      the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a brief silence&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman&mdash;a girl, Anita. A girl
+      I had been living with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For he was
+      quivering with dread when he said it&mdash;the courage of the man who
+      faces a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would have broken into
+      speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and was silent. Stewart watched
+      her as best he could in the darkness, trying to gather further courage to
+      go on. He could not see her face, but her fingers, touching the edge of
+      the chair, quivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I tell you the rest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think I want to hear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to condemn me unheard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't anything you can say against the fact?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he made his
+      plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what had happened
+      simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort. And he emphasized the
+      lack of sentiment that prompted the arrangement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita spoke then for the first time: &ldquo;And when you tried to terminate it
+      she attempted to kill you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then neglected her for
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear that, Anita.
+      But lately, in the last month or two, she&mdash;I suppose I should have
+      seen that she&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nineteen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had watched her
+      with wide, almost childish eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train coming
+      up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came up to see
+      me after the&mdash;after the accident, sent her away. I think he's looking
+      after her. I haven't heard from him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you tell me all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! After that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That, or something similar, is in many men's lives. They don't tell it,
+      that's the difference. I 'm not taking any credit for telling you this.
+      I'm ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when I look at your bandaged arm
+      I'm suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to tell you. He said I couldn't get
+      away with it; some time or other it would come out. Then he said something
+      else. He said you'd probably understand, and that if you married me it was
+      better to start with a clean slate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of fact, an
+      offer&mdash;his past against hers, his future with hers. Her hand was
+      steady now. The light in the priest's house had been extinguished. The
+      chill of the mountain night penetrated Anita's white furs; and set her&mdash;or
+      was it the chill?&mdash;to shivering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I had not told you, would you have married me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so. I'll be honest, too. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the same man you would have married. Only&mdash;more honest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas hugged
+      the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside was the little
+      balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing and looked down, down.
+      Some of the arrogance of his new virtue left the man. He was suddenly
+      humbled. For the first time he realized a part of what Marie had endured
+      in that small room where the light burned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor little Marie!&rdquo; he said softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he could have
+      made. Anita rose and held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and see her,&rdquo; she said quietly. &ldquo;You owe her that. We'll be leaving
+      here in a day or so and I'll not see you again. But you've been honest,
+      and I will be honest, too. I&mdash;I cared a great deal, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this has killed it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you are going away&mdash;I'm afraid to leave you. You'll think
+      this thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you've been taught will
+      come&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?&rdquo; humbly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not want you to kiss me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the darkness. If he
+      could only have crushed her to him, made her feel the security of his
+      love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier of his own building was
+      between them. His voice was husky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the thing
+      that concerns us both&mdash;I love you. I never loved the other woman. I
+      never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing more like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall try to remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the doctor and
+      the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart again. But before
+      she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre at the door, she went out
+      on the terrace, and looked across to the Villa Waldheim, rising from among
+      its clustering trees. Although it was too far to be certain, she thought
+      she saw the figure of a man on the little balcony standing with folded
+      arms, gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his promise
+      in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of the following day,
+      for Vienna. The strain of the confession was over, but he was a victim of
+      sickening dread. To one thing only he dared to pin his hopes. Anita had
+      said she cared, cared a great deal. And, after all, what else mattered?
+      The story had been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of queer ideas
+      of right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He arrived in Vienna at nine o'clock that night. The imminence of his
+      interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a hurried supper,
+      and calling up the Doctors' Club by telephone found Peter's address in the
+      Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea, of course, that Marie was there. He
+      wanted to see Peter to learn where Marie had taken refuge, and
+      incidentally to get from Peter a fresh supply of moral courage for the
+      interview. For he needed courage. In vain on the journey down had he
+      clothed himself in armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment
+      in the train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a
+      luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this station she
+      had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a nap. Ah, but again,
+      at this part of the journey he had first seen Anita!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter's manner of
+      living those days was exceedingly vague. He had respected Peter's
+      reticence, after the manner of men with each other. Peter had once
+      mentioned a boy he was looking after, in excuse for leaving so soon after
+      the accident. That was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted. The street
+      was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart found the gate. Even
+      then he lost the path, and found himself among a group of trees, to touch
+      the lowest branches of any of which resulted in a shower of raindrops. To
+      add to his discomfort some one was walking in the garden, coming toward
+      him with light, almost stealthy steps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached, were very
+      close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness that even then all he
+      saw was a blacker shadow, and that was visible only because it moved. Then
+      a hand touched his arm, stopped as if paralyzed, drew back slowly,
+      fearfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Heavens!&rdquo; said poor Harmony faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please don't be alarmed. I have lost the path.&rdquo; Stewart's voice was
+      almost equally nervous. &ldquo;Is it to the right or the left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the right a dozen paces or so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it quite well. Please don't bother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn on
+      Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking God's own
+      language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance, they made the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you not coming in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I&mdash;I do not live here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark facade
+      of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment later heard the
+      closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort of curious place was
+      this, a great looming house that concealed in its garden a fugitive
+      American girl who came and went like a shadow, leaving only the memory of
+      a sweet voice strained with fright?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the Portier gave
+      him and followed the gentleman's gruff directions up the staircase. Peter
+      admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as well he might with Marie in the
+      salon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter's expression. He shook the
+      rain off his hat, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How are you?&rdquo; asked Peter dutifully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty good, except for a headache when I'm tired. What sort of a place
+      have you got here anyhow, Byrne?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,&rdquo; replied Peter, still preoccupied
+      with Marie and what was coming. &ldquo;Rather interesting old place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather,&rdquo; commented Stewart, &ldquo;with goddesses in the garden and all the
+      usual stunts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Goddesses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ran into one just now among the trees. 'A woman I forswore, but thou
+      being a goddess I forswore not thee.' English-speaking goddess, by
+      George!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and grasped
+      his arm in fingers of steel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven's sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in the
+      garden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle a
+      situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke through a
+      hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the compass&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's fingers closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's manner lost its jauntiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a girl there,&rdquo; he said shortly. &ldquo;Couldn't see her. She spoke
+      English. Said she didn't live here, and broke for the gate the minute I
+      got to the path.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't see her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Nice voice, though. Young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was running down
+      the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to the Portier to unlock
+      the door, was a madman in everything but purpose. The Portier let him out
+      and returned to the bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boy above is worse,&rdquo; he said briefly. &ldquo;A strange doctor has just
+      come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug store.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier's wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can one expect?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;The good Herr Gott has forbidden
+      theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the druggist has gone to
+      visit his wife's mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I shall go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found Peter's
+      excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived, an old house,
+      isolated in a garden where rambled young women with soft voices. Hello, a
+      youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie. The place
+      was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the indescribable odor of
+      drugs that meant illness. He remembered that the boy was frail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose,
+      white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each other.
+      Marie's crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger than speech. It was
+      after a distinct pause that she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hast thou brought the police?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart's mental
+      condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it was with
+      tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And yet&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So it's old Peter now, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all. I swear
+      it. I look after the boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who else is here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one else; but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell that rot to some one who does not know you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not lie.&rdquo;
+       There was a catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men somewhat, but she
+      still cherished the feminine belief that jealousy is love, whereas it is
+      only injured pride. She took a step toward him. &ldquo;Walter, I am sorry. Do
+      you hate me?&rdquo; She had dropped the familiar &ldquo;thou.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart crossed the room until only Peter's table and lamp stood between
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't mean to be brutal,&rdquo; he said, rather largely, entirely conscious
+      of his own magnanimity. &ldquo;It was pretty bad up there and I know it. I don't
+      hate you, of course. That's hardly possible after&mdash;everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;would take me back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It's over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that's all; to see
+      that you were comfortable and not frightened. You're a silly child to
+      think of the police.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie put a hand to her throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the American, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. &ldquo;Then I wish I had
+      killed her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman for her
+      rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation in hand and Marie
+      only feebly formidable, was rather amused and flattered by the honest fury
+      in her voice. The mouse was under his paw; he would play a bit. &ldquo;You'll
+      get over feeling that way, kid. You don't really love me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were my God, that is all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you let me help you&mdash;money, I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep it for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter will be here in a minute.&rdquo; He bent over the table and eyed her with
+      his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. &ldquo;Come round here and kiss me
+      for old times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a step or two
+      toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew himself up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite right and I'm a rotter.&rdquo; Marie's English did not comprehend
+      &ldquo;rotter,&rdquo; but she knew the tone. &ldquo;Listen, Marie, I've told the other girl,
+      and there's a chance for me, anyhow. Some day she may marry me. She asked
+      me to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not wish her pity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say, without a dot.
+      There is a chance in America for a clever girl. You are clever, little
+      Marie. The first money I can spare I'll send you&mdash;if you'll take it.
+      It's all I can do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled from
+      him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an explanation.
+      When at last she understood that he was sincere, she broke down. Stewart,
+      playing a new part and raw in it, found the situation irritating. But
+      Marie's tears were not entirely bitter. Back of them her busy young mind
+      was weaving a new warp of life, with all of America for its loom. Hope
+      that had died lived again. Before her already lay that great country where
+      women might labor and live by the fruit of their labor, where her tawdry
+      past would be buried in the center of distant Europe. New life beckoned to
+      the little Marie that night in the old salon of Maria Theresa, beckoned to
+      her as it called to Stewart, opportunity to one, love and work to the
+      other. To America!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go,&rdquo; she said at last simply. &ldquo;And I will not trouble you there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick gesture
+      she held it to her cheek, dropped it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He had not
+      found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well, still in Vienna,
+      and&mdash;she had come back! She had cared then enough to come back.
+      To-morrow he would commence again, would comb the city fine, and when he
+      had found her he would bring her back, the wanderer, to a marvelous
+      welcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few belongings
+      by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still stained with tears but
+      radiant with hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter,&rdquo; she said gravely, &ldquo;I must prepare my outfit. I go to America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With Stewart?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am very happy,
+      although&mdash;Peter, may I kiss you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her thin
+      shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who had cared
+      enough to come back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life,&rdquo; said Peter soberly, &ldquo;life is just one damned thing after another,
+      isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She said:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt you very
+      much&mdash;but not, believe me, without hurting myself. Perhaps my
+      uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing you, that I am not
+      so big as you thought I would be. For now, in this final letter, I can
+      tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear, I did care!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have gone
+      very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy as I have does
+      not support me to-night, that all my little rules of life are inadequate.
+      Individual liberty was one&mdash;but there is no liberty of the
+      individual. Life&mdash;other lives&mdash;press too closely. You, living
+      your life as seemed best and easiest, and carrying down with you into
+      shipwreck the little Marie and&mdash;myself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It is not
+      only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady revolt and
+      loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest before one succumbs
+      to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred that is a part of me and that
+      would never forget.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say that you are the same man I would have married, only more honest
+      for concealing nothing. But&mdash;and forgive me this, it insists on
+      coming up in my mind&mdash;were you honest, really? You told me, and it
+      took courage, but wasn't it partly fear? What motive is unmixed? Honesty&mdash;and
+      fear, Walter. You were preparing against a contingency, although you may
+      not admit this to yourself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am only
+      trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break is final. The
+      revolt is in myself, against something sordid and horrible which I will
+      not take into my life. And for that reason time will make no difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great deal of
+      this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter&mdash;home and children,
+      the love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals. And you ask me to
+      start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know you are resentful, but&mdash;I
+      know that you understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;ANITA.&rdquo; <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine was
+      threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with Bulgaria
+      sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing troops, and there were
+      long conferences in the Burg between the Emperor and various bearded
+      gentlemen, while the military prayed in the churches for war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on all day in
+      the small room below Harmony's on the Wollbadgasse. At night, when the man
+      in the green velours hat took a little sleep, mysterious packages were
+      carried down the whitewashed staircase and loaded into wagons waiting
+      below. Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the pigeons a carrier
+      pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morning after Harmony's flight from the garden in the Street of
+      Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She had put in a
+      sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She charged herself with
+      cowardice in running away from Peter and Jimmy when they needed her, and
+      in going back like a thief the night before. The conviction that the boy
+      was not so well brought with it additional introspection&mdash;her
+      sacrifice seemed useless, almost childish. She had fled because two men
+      thought it necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and
+      she did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had
+      promised herself, had been promised. But this career, for which she had
+      given up everything else&mdash;would she find it in the workroom of a
+      dressmaker?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose&mdash;how her cheeks
+      burned when she thought of it!&mdash;suppose she had taken Peter at his
+      word and married him? What about Peter's career? Was there any way by
+      which Peter's poverty for one would be comfort for two? Was there any
+      reason why Peter, with his splendid ability, should settle down to the
+      hack-work of general practice, the very slough out of which he had so
+      painfully climbed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Either of two things&mdash;go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or stay
+      where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew. There in the
+      little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held out her arms
+      longingly. &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Peter, dear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no one. The
+      instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at any cost
+      outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard and tired, looking
+      out. It was Harmony's chance, perhaps, to do a big thing; to prove herself
+      bigger than her fears, stronger than convention. But she was young,
+      bewildered, afraid. And there was this element, stronger than any of the
+      others&mdash;Peter had never told her he loved her. To go back, throwing
+      herself again on his mercy, was unthinkable. On his love&mdash;that was
+      different. But what if he did not love her? He had been good to her; but
+      then Peter was good to every one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his mother?
+      Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose he were to die
+      and his mother not see him? Harmony's sense of fairness rebelled. In the
+      small community at home mother was sacred, her claims insistent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on the sill;
+      over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous strip foretold the
+      sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the market, lumbered along the
+      streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony rose and lighted her fire, drew on
+      her slippers and the faded silk kimono with the pink butterflies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early morning dreams
+      of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining customers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in order, fed
+      the pigeons,&mdash;it was then she saw the carrier with its message,&mdash;made
+      her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside the stove. And all the
+      time, moving quietly through her morning routine, she was there in that
+      upper room in body only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in the
+      Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the hutch, and Peter,
+      with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed, toilet-table, coffee-pot,
+      Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise over the church roof, and Peter
+      again. Always Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear her,
+      muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the Hungarian maid
+      for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one of her new duties to
+      prepare the workroom for the day. The luminous streak above the church was
+      rose now, time for the day to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the door, so
+      faint was the sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony, expecting
+      Monia, called &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face. He stood
+      in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear toward the stairway.
+      It was very silent. Monia was drinking her coffee in bed, whither she had
+      retired for warmth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon!&rdquo; said the Bulgarian in a whisper. &ldquo;I listened until I heard you
+      moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something has happened!&rdquo; exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor to open
+      your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I fear&mdash;on the
+      sill, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once, but the
+      carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and set about its
+      breakfast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will he let me catch him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A handful of
+      grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown! Georgiev caught the
+      pigeon and drew the message from the tube. Even Harmony grasped the
+      seriousness of the situation. The little Bulgarian's face, from gray
+      became livid; tiny beads of cold sweat came out on his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I done?&rdquo; cried Harmony. &ldquo;Oh, what have I done? If I had known
+      about the pigeon&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Georgiev recovered himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein can do nothing wrong,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is a matter of an hour's
+      delay, that is all. It may not be too late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee. The sulky
+      Hungarian brought it without a glance in their direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too late for what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein, if I may trouble you&mdash;but glance from the window to the
+      street below. It is of an urgency, or I&mdash;Please, Fraulein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind
+      her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only a man in a green hat,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And down the street a group of
+      soldiers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are coming for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I with the pigeon&mdash;Oh, it's too horrible! Herr Georgiev, stay
+      here in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is mine&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the pigeon.
+      It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but a matter of&mdash;imprisonment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be something I can do,&rdquo; desperately. &ldquo;I hear them below. Is
+      there no way to the roof, no escape?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of
+      peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not going down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly,
+      and not for a lady to confront.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are coming up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
+      unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest,
+      turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein,&rdquo; he said huskily, &ldquo;you are very lovely. I carry always in my
+      heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down the
+      staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap on
+      the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have
+      feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable
+      like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as
+      unobtrusively as he had entered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
+      washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered what
+      was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief are great
+      moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message, English,
+      German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Herr Georgiev has been arrested,&rdquo; she wrote. An hour later the
+      carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over the church
+      roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life. Grim-visaged war had
+      touched her and passed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building
+      followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned
+      out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden
+      hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor was found stored a quantity of
+      ammunition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished, when
+      the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the chattering
+      sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way to her
+      dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully
+      descended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her ears;
+      the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from the
+      workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition boxes
+      on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in,
+      toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, &ldquo;Yea, yea,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Nay,
+      nay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal, infinitely
+      touching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will not say that you have found, have seen me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in Harmony's mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to learn&mdash;of
+      Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that belonged to the old life
+      in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was no time. The sentry's impassive
+      face became rigid; he looked through her, not at her. Harmony turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was no further
+      chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the boxes down the
+      staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in the
+      market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in the
+      Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony's golden head as she bent over a bit of
+      chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the whitewashed staircase her
+      heavy cans of milk; on the carrier pigeon winging its way to the south;
+      beating in through bars to the exalted face of Herr Georgiev; resting on
+      Peter's drooping shoulders, on the neglected mice and the wooden soldier,
+      on the closed eyes of a sick child&mdash;the worshiped sun, peering forth&mdash;the
+      golden window of the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through the
+      night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had been
+      times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With the
+      daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of hope,
+      enough to make harder Peter's acceptance of the inevitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened his
+      eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter died
+      many deaths that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie,
+      creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently asleep
+      and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at her footstep
+      and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He motioned her
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must have a little sleep, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I'll stay until&mdash;Go back to bed. It is very early.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now it
+      was useless. At eight o'clock he let Marie take his place, then he bathed
+      and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another night. For
+      the child's release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast, but managed
+      only a cup of coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was insistent&mdash;the
+      boy's mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her. Peter might know
+      in his heart that he had done the best thing for the child, but like
+      Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse him. He had separated
+      mother and child. Who was he to have decided the mother's unfitness, to
+      have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the lives of others in his
+      hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where; the boy dying without his
+      mother. Whatever that mother might be, her place that day was with her
+      boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He was humbled as well as
+      stricken, poor Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the
+      mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter,
+      signed only &ldquo;Mamma,&rdquo; was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And for Heaven's sake be quick,&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;This is a matter of hours.
+      I meant well, but I've done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no matter
+      what she is or where you find her.&rdquo; The Portier carried the note. When he
+      came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and a lettuce
+      leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and amuse the boy.
+      He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. &ldquo;He saw it not,&rdquo; he reported
+      sadly to his wife. &ldquo;Be off to the church while I deliver this letter. And
+      this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in remembrance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At eleven o'clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair
+      sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He asks for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy's eyes were open and
+      fixed on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it another day?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, boy; another morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am cold, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he could
+      see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very humble, found
+      himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To see this small
+      soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a bit of light for
+      the journey! Peter's religion had been one of life and living, not of
+      creed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He knows, poor little one!&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of
+      broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the
+      cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from
+      the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One is sick, Jimmy boy,&rdquo; he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and
+      shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, honey, I think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind
+      too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed
+      eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter bent
+      over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, dear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid&mdash;it's going to die!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?&rdquo; asked Peter gently. &ldquo;To go to
+      heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer
+      and the sun always shines?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed
+      its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their dead
+      mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there grass?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;soft green grass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do&mdash;boys in heaven&mdash;go in their bare feet?&rdquo; Ah, small mind and
+      heart, so terrified and yet so curious!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, yes.&rdquo; And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted
+      such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint&mdash;a
+      heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of dear
+      departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees in
+      fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with smiling
+      eyes and death in his heart, a child's heaven of games and friendly
+      Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was
+      increasingly an effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should&mdash;like&mdash;to go there,&rdquo; he whispered at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk he
+      roused again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would like&mdash;to see&mdash;the sentry,&rdquo; he said with difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so again, and for the last time, Rosa's soldier from Salzburg with one
+      lung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed
+      muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears. Monia, upset over the
+      morning's excitement, was irritable and unreasonable. The gold-tissue
+      costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint. Below in the
+      courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where the
+      morning had seen such occurrences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of
+      salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of
+      playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour of
+      the day. To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia
+      quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the
+      pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play
+      such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her whole
+      beautiful face and body glowing with the melody she made, the girls found
+      the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she did not suspect
+      it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the workroom. She was not of
+      the people, they said&mdash;the daughter of a great American, of course,
+      run away to escape a loveless marriage. This was borne out by the report
+      of one of them who had glimpsed the silk petticoat. It was rumored also
+      that she wore no chemise, but instead an infinitely coquettish series of
+      lace and nainsook garments&mdash;of a fineness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not played
+      since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to Peter as she
+      had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little Georgiev as he went
+      down the staircase. And finally with a choke in her throat to the little
+      mother back home, so hopeful, so ignorant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of the day
+      at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd and coming back
+      quickly through the winter night. The staircase was always a peril, to be
+      encountered and conquered night after night and even in the daytime not to
+      be lightly regarded. On her way up this night she heard steps ahead,
+      heavy, measured steps that climbed steadily without pauses. For an instant
+      Harmony thought it sounded like Peter's step and she went dizzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had stood
+      that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels in, toes out,
+      chest out, was the sentry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the
+      building. Then she saw that the sentry's impassive face wore lines of
+      trouble. He saluted. &ldquo;Please, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not told the Herr Doktor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the child dies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jimmy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps, but of
+      moments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. &ldquo;You are sure? You
+      are not telling me so that I will go back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours. My wife,
+      Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and her cousin, the wife
+      of the Portier, weeps over the stove. Please, Fraulein, come with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he still lives?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all that was
+      personal and small and frightened, before the reality of death. She rose,
+      as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis; ceased trembling, got her
+      hat and coat and her shabby gloves and joined the sentry again. Another
+      moment's delay&mdash;to secure the Le Grande's address from Monia. Then
+      out into the night, Harmony to the Siebensternstrasse, the tall soldier to
+      find the dancer at her hotel, or failing that, at the Ronacher Music-Hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony took a taxicab&mdash;nothing must be spared now&mdash;bribed the
+      chauffeur to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across the
+      garden, still tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper flight, and
+      rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was nothing
+      to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in hand, alone, drear,
+      tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw Harmony and went white,
+      holding to the back of his chair. Their eyes met, agony and hope in them,
+      love and death, rapture and bitterness. In Harmony's, pleading, promise,
+      something of doubt; in Peter's, only yearning, as of empty arms. Then
+      Harmony dared to look at the bed and fell on her knees in a storm of grief
+      beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the immense
+      theater waiters scurried back and forward among the tables. Everywhere was
+      the clatter of silver and steel on porcelain, the clink of glasses. Smoke
+      was everywhere&mdash;pipes, cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between bites
+      at the tables, using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a gold one
+      shone here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners, spraying
+      the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the stage sat
+      the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph. They were drinking
+      cheap native wines and were very happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the people to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the box&mdash;don't stare, Liebchen, he looks&mdash;is the princeling
+      I have told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Last night! Were you here?&rdquo; He coughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when she
+      finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and tosses them
+      to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shameless! Is she so beautiful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But you shall see. She comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the program;
+      and because she sang in American, which is not exactly English and more
+      difficult to understand, her songs were considered exceedingly risque. As
+      a matter of fact they were merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to them
+      that caught the Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentimental ditties
+      and the artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another reason for
+      her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen pickaninnies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the
+      little chorus had made good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind
+      her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet coats
+      and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a pair sat on the boot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing against
+      dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by cigarettes and
+      absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled their American prototypes as
+      the night resembles the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
+      rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve little
+      darkies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sang &ldquo;Dixie,&rdquo; of course, and the &ldquo;Old Folks at Home&rdquo;; then a ragtime
+      medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and clogging with all
+      their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a whirling, nimble dance. The
+      little rhinestones on her stockings flashed; her opulent bosom quivered.
+      The Dozent, eyes on the dancer, squeezed his companion's hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love thee!&rdquo; he whispered, rather flushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she sang &ldquo;Doan ye cry, mah honey.&rdquo; Her voice, rather coarse but
+      melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing and lilt of the
+      lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling, preternaturally solemn, linked
+      arms and swayed rhythmically, right, left, right, left. The glasses ceased
+      clinking; sturdy citizens forgot their steak and beer for a moment and
+      listened, knife and fork poised. Under the table the Dozent's hand pressed
+      its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer on Le Grande, but on the
+      woman across, his sweetheart, she who would be mother of his children. The
+      words meant little to the audience; the rich, rolling Southern lullaby
+      held them rapt:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Doan ye Cry, mah honey&mdash;
+     Doan ye weep no mo',
+     Mammy's gwine to hold her baby,
+     All de udder black trash sleepin' on the flo',&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against her
+      breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The crowd
+      applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung them. Glasses
+      and dishes clinked again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent bent across the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day&mdash;&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl blushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little troupe. A
+      motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off, rounded them up like a
+      flock of chickens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier of the
+      old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room. For a moment gold
+      dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted each other. Then the sentry
+      touched his cap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and to-night he
+      dies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What child?&rdquo; Her arms were full of flowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The child from the hospital. Please to make haste.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with one hand in
+      Harmony's and one between Peter's two big ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward the last he called Peter &ldquo;Daddy&rdquo; and asked for a drink. His eyes,
+      moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the grayfaced woman in
+      a gold dress who stood staring down at him, rested a moment on the cage of
+      mice, came to a stop in the doorway, where stood the sentry, white and
+      weary, but refusing rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Harmony who divined the child's unspoken wish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The manual?&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across from the
+      old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but no lack of vigor,
+      went again through the Austrian manual of arms, and because he had no
+      carbine he used Peter's old walking-stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony he loved
+      her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had about given out, and
+      there was no way to get more save by earning it. The drain of Jimmy's
+      illness, the inevitable expense of the small grave and the tiny stone
+      Peter had insisted on buying, had made retreat his only course. True, Le
+      Grande had wished to defray all expenses, but Peter was inexorable. No
+      money earned as the dancer earned hers should purchase peaceful rest for
+      the loved little body. And after seeing Peter's eyes the dancer had not
+      insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference between
+      Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart raised the money
+      somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and eager, with the pin he had
+      sent her to Semmering at her throat. She kissed Peter on the cheek in the
+      station, rather to his embarrassment. From the lowered window, as the
+      train pulled out, she waved a moist handkerchief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be very good,&rdquo; she promised him. The last words he heard above
+      the grinding of the train were her cheery: &ldquo;To America!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food where he
+      might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the delicatessen
+      shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the house in the
+      Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until Marie's small
+      preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter was at the
+      station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her address. She
+      wrote:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before and
+      that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in the
+      Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have been
+      trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for me. You
+      must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I am managing
+      well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening lesson, and soon
+      I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can see how things are
+      looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to renew my music
+      lessons. And then, Peter,&mdash;the career!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;HARMONY.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her address was beneath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with the
+      letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer her
+      nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps, surely,
+      everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only once taken
+      the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life itself to him.
+      But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in everything else,
+      had sapped his confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself
+      confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined
+      face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child's head
+      against its breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must
+      let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to
+      success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had
+      proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care of
+      herself in the old city. Only&mdash;to go away and leave her there!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in the
+      Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen
+      during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony's every word, every
+      gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard work began to tell on her,
+      McLean's devotion would win its reward. McLean's devotion, with all that
+      it meant, the lessons again, community of taste, their common youth! Peter
+      felt old, very tired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his gray suit
+      to the Portier's wife to be pressed, and getting out his surgical case, as
+      he had once before in the Pension Schwarz, he sewed a button on his
+      overcoat, using the curved needle and the catgut and working with
+      surgeon's precision. Then, still working very carefully, he trimmed the
+      edges of graying hair over his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best
+      silk tie, now almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not
+      coming, he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy's room to feed the
+      mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with his face
+      working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in Peter's mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his defeat and
+      approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them. Then he decided against
+      this palpable appeal for sympathy, elected to go empty-handed and discover
+      merely how comfortable she was or was not. When the time came he would
+      slip out of her life, sending her a letter and leaving McLean on guard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase&mdash;where Harmony
+      had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down to his death&mdash;climbed
+      steadily, but without his usual elasticity. The place appalled him&mdash;its
+      gloom, its dinginess, its somber quiet. In the daylight, with the pigeons
+      on the sills and the morning sunlight printing the cross of the church
+      steeple on the whitewashed wall, it was peaceful, cloisterlike, with
+      landings that were crypts. But at night it was almost terrifying, that
+      staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper landing,
+      playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He waited outside
+      before ringing, heard her begin something determinedly cheerful, falter,
+      cease altogether. Peter rang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps&mdash;oh, certainly she had expected
+      him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how she was getting on,
+      how she was housed. She held out her hand and Peter took it. Still no
+      words, only a half smile from her and no smile at all from Peter, but his
+      heart in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You knew I would come,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;The reception room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where customers wait.&rdquo; She still carried her violin, and slipped back to
+      her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its
+      meagerness. He drew a long breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen knitting a
+      stocking. The reception room was warm from the day's fire, and in order.
+      All the pins and scraps of the day had been swept up, and the portieres
+      that made fitting-rooms of the corners were pushed back. Peter saw only a
+      big room with empty corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were
+      Harmony's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet settee. They
+      were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first time. In the squalor of
+      the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable intimacies of the Street of Seven
+      Stars, they had been easy, unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was
+      tongue-tied. Only one thing in him clamored for utterance, and that he
+      sternly silenced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Of course, I understood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were not angry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I needed
+      you. Only, of course,&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll not say that, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please say it, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me, only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only&mdash;I always need you!&rdquo; Peter, Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs a woman;
+      but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, of course&mdash;but&mdash;I'm generally in trouble, Harry dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of his
+      weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by stooping for a
+      neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had stuck it in his lapel he
+      had saved his mental forces from the rout of Harmony's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most delectable
+      look in the aforesaid eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't come to be silly,&rdquo; he said to the table. &ldquo;I hate people who
+      whine, and I've got into a damnable habit of being sorry for myself! It's
+      to laugh, isn't it, a great, hulking carcass like me, to be&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter,&rdquo; said Harmony softly, &ldquo;aren't you going to look at me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's cowardice. And I've fixed my hair a new way. Do you like it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Splendid,&rdquo; said Peter to the center table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rout of Harmony's eyes was supplemented by the rout of Harmony's hair.
+      Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony was half exasperated; she
+      would have boxed Peter's ears with a tender hand had she dared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced her at
+      last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going back to America, Harmony. I've got
+      all I can get here, all I came for&mdash;&rdquo; He stopped, seeing her face.
+      &ldquo;Well, of course, that's not true, I haven't. But I'm going back, anyhow.
+      You needn't look so stricken: I haven't lost my chance. I'll come back
+      sometime again and finish, when I've earned enough to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money on others,
+      and now you are going back just where you were, and&mdash;you are leaving
+      me here alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are alone, anyhow,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;making your own way and getting
+      along. And McLean will be here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you turning me over to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, dear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember the night in Anna's room at the Schwartz when you
+      proposed to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No reply. Peter found another pin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young figure, her
+      luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter, I want you to&mdash;to ask me again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, listen to me, Harmony. You're sorry for me, that's all; I don't want
+      to be pitied. You stay here and work. You'll do big things. I had a talk
+      with the master while I was searching for you, and he says you can do
+      anything. But he looked at me&mdash;and a sight I was with worry and
+      fright&mdash;and he warned me off, Harmony. He says you must not marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old pig!&rdquo; said Harmony. &ldquo;I will marry if I please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless Peter's refusal and the master's speech had told somewhat.
+      She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood close, looking down
+      at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've said a lot I didn't mean to,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There's only one thing I
+      haven't said, I oughtn't to say it, dear. I'm not going to marry you&mdash;I
+      won't have such a thing on my conscience. But it doesn't hurt a woman to
+      know that a man loves her. I love you, dear. You're my heaven and my earth&mdash;even
+      my God, I'm afraid. But I will not marry you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even if I ask you to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even then, dear. To share my struggle&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; slowly. &ldquo;It is to be a struggle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hard fight, Harmony. I'm a pauper practically.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two poverties don't make a wealth, even of happiness,&rdquo; said Peter
+      steadily. &ldquo;In the time to come, when you would think of what you might
+      have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People have married, women have married and carried on their work, too,
+      Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of man,
+      Harry. I'm jealous&mdash;jealous of every one about you. It would have to
+      be the music or me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you make the choice!&rdquo; said Harmony proudly. &ldquo;Very well, Peter, I
+      shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious sort of love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; Peter cried, &ldquo;if you realize what love it is that loves you
+      enough to give you up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not asked me if I care, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very beautiful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid to ask,&rdquo; said Peter, and picking up his hat he made for the
+      door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sweetest heart!&rdquo; he cried, and took her in his hungry arms. But even
+      then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her slender body held to
+      him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to her soft throat, Peter put her
+      from him as a starving man might put away food.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held her off and looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a fool and a weakling,&rdquo; he said gravely. &ldquo;I love you so much that I
+      would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my girl! As long as I
+      live I shall carry your image in my heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death that waited
+      down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her again, put away her
+      detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, Harmony,&rdquo; he said steadily. &ldquo;Always in my heart!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America, with the
+      recording angel opening a new page in life's ledger for her and a red-ink
+      line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his daddy wandering through the
+      heaven of friendly adventure and green fields, hand in hand; with the
+      carrier resting after its labors in the pigeon house by the rose-fields of
+      Sofia; with the sentry casting martial shadows through the barred windows
+      of the hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to die, dividing his
+      heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining into the
+      salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter's open trunk and shabby wardrobe
+      spread over chairs. An end of trunks and departure, as was the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God's acre, whence little Jimmy had
+      started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on the frost-covered
+      grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle of the Donau. Harmony had
+      taken her problem there, in the early hour before Monia would summon her
+      to labor&mdash;took her problem and found her answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too warmly clad,
+      walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper against the cold.
+      Already the air carried a hint of spring; there was a feeling of
+      resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt alive under-foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child had
+      repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it, with some
+      vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the little verse:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes:
+      And in the hereafter, angels may Roll the stone from its grave away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great bunch of
+      roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence they came. One of the
+      pickaninnies had carried the box and stood impassively by, gazing at
+      Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered it, quite
+      eclipsed Harmony's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come here every morning,&rdquo; she said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the city. Her
+      quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked once into the woman's
+      eyes. After that she knew. It was on the drive back, with the little darky
+      on the box beside the driver, that Harmony got her answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande put a hand over Harmony's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We loved him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right&mdash;I was not a fit person
+      to&mdash;to have him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not that&mdash;not only that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he ever ask for me? But of course not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he had no remembrance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I loved him very much when he came,&rdquo; said Le Grande, &ldquo;although I did not
+      want him. I had been told I could have a career on the stage. Ah, my dear,
+      I chose the career&mdash;and look at me! What have I? A grave in the
+      cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by a man I loathe! If I could
+      live it over again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer was very close now:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you stay at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the boy
+      always. There is only one thing worth while&mdash;the love of a good man.
+      I have lived, lived hard. And I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But supposing that one has real ability&mdash;I mean some achievement
+      already, and a promise&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. You are a musician, I believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;it is Dr. Byrne?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande bent forward earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My child,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if one man in all the world looked at me as your
+      doctor looks at you, I&mdash;I would be a better woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And my music?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Play for your children, as you played for my little boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting clean
+      collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like negligible garments
+      with great care and putting in his dresscoat in a roll. His pipes took
+      time, and the wooden sentry he packed with great care and a bit of healthy
+      emotion. Once or twice he came across trifles of Harmony's, and he put
+      them carefully aside&mdash;the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief, a bow
+      she had worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before and that
+      reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get away if he is to
+      keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon bow can bring that look of
+      suffering into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot, any foot at
+      all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen,&rdquo; he sang at the top of his
+      voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the air. The
+      antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in his bedroom. When
+      the wildgame seller came over for coffee there would be a discussion
+      probably. But were not the antlers of all deer similar?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier's wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A cab,&rdquo; she announced, &ldquo;with a devil's imp on the box. Perhaps it is that
+      American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache. Harmony was
+      at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week before or the
+      undecided and troubled girl of before that. A radiant Harmony, this, who
+      stood in the doorway, who wished them good-morning, and ran up the old
+      staircase with glowing eyes and a heart that leaped and throbbed. A woman
+      now, this Harmony, one who had looked on life and learned; one who had
+      chosen her fate and was running to meet it; one who feared only death, not
+      life or anything that life could offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up&mdash;not dressed. What
+      did that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney's Point, had come across a bit of
+      paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his open trunk,
+      staring blindly at it:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H. W.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite the end now, with Harmony running across the room and dropping down
+      on her knees among a riot of garments&mdash;down on her knees, with one
+      arm round Peter's neck, drawing his tired head lower until she could kiss
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Peter, Peter, dear!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I'll love you all my life if only
+      you'll love me, and never, never let me go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was dazed at first. He put his arms about her rather unsteadily,
+      because he had given her up and had expected to go through the rest of
+      life empty of arm and heart. And when one has one's arms set, as one may
+      say, for loneliness and relinquishment it is rather difficult&mdash;Ah,
+      but Peter got the way of it swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always,&rdquo; he said incoherently; &ldquo;forever the two of us. Whatever comes,
+      Harmony?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you'll not be sorry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if you love me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter kissed her on the eyes very solemnly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God helping me, I'll be good to you always. And I'll always love you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to hold her away from him for a moment after that, to tell her
+      what she was doing, what she was giving up. She would not be reasoned
+      with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love you,&rdquo; was her answer to every line. And it was no divided
+      allegiance she promised him. &ldquo;Career? I shall have a career. Yours!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And your music?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She colored, held him closer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;I shall tell you about that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Late winter morning in Vienna, with the school-children hurrying home, the
+      Alserstrasse alive with humanity&mdash;soldiers and chimney-sweeps,
+      housewives and beggars. Before the hospital the crowd lines up along the
+      curb; the head waiter from the coffee-house across comes to the doorway
+      and looks out. The sentry in front of the hospital ceases pacing and
+      stands at attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street a small procession comes at the double quick&mdash;a handful
+      of troopers, a black van with tiny, high-barred windows, more troopers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the van a Bulgarian spy going out to death&mdash;a swarthy little
+      man with black eyes and short, thick hands, going out like a gentleman and
+      a soldier to meet the God of patriots and lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sentry, who was only a soldier from Salzburg with one lung, was also a
+      gentleman and a patriot. He uncovered his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1214 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a8d6af3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1214 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1214)
diff --git a/old/1214-0.txt b/old/1214-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4b0723e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1214-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9820 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Street of Seven Stars
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Posting Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1214]
+Release Date: February, 1998
+Last Updated: March 9, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Delaney
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
+
+By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been
+a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game
+preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the
+building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something royal
+in the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the
+great glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling
+was mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great
+empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to
+anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
+related not a few herself.
+
+The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside
+in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the
+heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named
+Scatchett and dubbed “Scatch”--the gate slammed to and fro monotonously,
+giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched
+itself, a hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.
+
+One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of
+enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto,
+it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give
+light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still
+burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the
+disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a
+small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,--there were never enough to go
+round,--and on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned
+for the things of the flesh.
+
+The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with the
+slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft
+under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old
+floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled
+near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no
+impatience, however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put
+them together carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of
+the grand piano, anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from
+the stand.
+
+The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows, half
+a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano. There
+were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners and
+was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
+stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
+under her fingers.
+
+In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
+armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance
+of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could
+reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.
+
+The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that
+the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed
+the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let
+the initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had
+been made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what;
+and it revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of
+trunks. The girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and
+looked at the trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A
+door slammed down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into
+one of those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
+rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
+
+The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells,
+a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite “Arlesienne”
+ will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
+“Siegfried” will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more
+than once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of
+early rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with
+stiffened fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a
+stove, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once
+pink butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls,
+and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in
+the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves
+and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down
+the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German,
+helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one
+might practice peacefully.
+
+Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
+from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
+listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he
+shook his fist up the stone staircase.
+
+“Gott im Himmel!” he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of
+his mustache bandage, “what a people, these Americans! So much noise and
+no music!”
+
+“And mad!” grumbled his wife. “All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
+night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it.”
+
+And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going
+back to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch
+was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her
+head much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters
+had gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds
+were very low with all of them. The “Bitte zum speisen” of the little
+German maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of
+beef and carrots.
+
+Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
+never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days--a fruitcake
+from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or twice
+on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth it.
+Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and
+a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh,
+yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and
+the faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all
+had always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad--the
+expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the
+contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in
+one's mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after
+nine months of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not
+at all.
+
+Or--and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
+soul--to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
+undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony
+stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was calling
+down the hall.
+
+“Scatch,” she was shouting briskly, “where is my hairbrush?”
+
+A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
+
+“I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't you got
+a comb?”
+
+“As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the teeth
+are out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look under the bed.”
+
+Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
+
+“Here it is,” she called joyously. “And here are Harmony's bedroom
+slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!” The girl got down off the
+chair and went to the door.
+
+“Thanks, dear,” she said. “I'm coming in a minute.”
+
+She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa,
+and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the
+window the air would brighten them.
+
+Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano's
+room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her
+shabby wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were
+no footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to
+the Big Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and
+held out her hand.
+
+“Look!” she said. “Under my bed! Ten kronen!”
+
+Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and
+ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the
+dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on
+which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the
+candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.
+
+“The first for a week,” she said. “Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there
+may be another relic of my prosperous days.”
+
+But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a
+government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen
+piece.
+
+“Where is the other?” she asked in a whisper.
+
+“In my powder-box.”
+
+Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.
+
+“Every little bit,” she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, “added
+to what she's got, makes just a little bit more.”
+
+“Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it,
+it's good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without
+losing it now. I'll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New
+York--I haven't even a dollar for tips.”
+
+“New York!” said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. “If Henry meets
+me I know he will--”
+
+“Tut!” The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. “You
+and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young
+mind that money isn't the only thing Harmony is going to need? She's
+going to be alone--and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not
+like us. You have your Henry. I'm a beefy person who has a stomach, and
+I'm thankful for it. But she is different--she's got the thing that you
+are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to
+fight in a church choir instead of grand opera.”
+
+Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
+
+“Temperament?” she asked. It had always been accepted in the little
+colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser
+firmament.
+
+The Big Soprano sniffed.
+
+“If you like,” she said. “Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to
+have souls, Scatchy, dear.”
+
+This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was coming
+down the hall.
+
+“I thought, under her pillow,” she whispered. “She'll find it--”
+
+Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame
+of a candle.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having
+seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back
+alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were
+gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little
+Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry's arms about her,
+had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears
+of paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets
+were still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the
+room.
+
+Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense
+of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming
+gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place
+at best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door,
+eyes and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure
+had stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment
+the gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind
+her.
+
+The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his
+mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented
+when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early
+morning practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he
+cherished a hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was
+for her he wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day--hopefully! One
+must be ready!
+
+The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the
+five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece
+of his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a
+gesture.
+
+“Bitte, Fraulein!” he said through the bandage. “It is for me a pleasure
+to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup.”
+
+The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over
+his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to
+Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could
+not but she held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in
+his best manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the
+stone staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her
+with his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
+
+The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting
+to Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out
+into the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the
+shadows, and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.
+
+It was when--having picked up her violin in a very passion of
+loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds
+echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms--it was when she was
+ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl
+from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having
+adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the
+gifted:--
+
+DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am
+honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if
+you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this
+pleasure. Harry, you have it--the real thing, you know, whatever it
+is--and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go
+now, just when lessons would mean everything--well, you must not think
+of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or
+at least--well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by being
+careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but it may help.
+Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and it may be yours
+anyhow.
+
+“Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things about our
+leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You are so beautiful,
+Harry,--although you never let us tell you so. And Sadie says you have
+a soul and I haven't, and that souls are deadly things to have. I feel
+to-night that in urging you to stay I am taking the burden of your soul
+on me! Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you
+call a policeman. And be sure you get into a respectable pension. There
+are queer ones.
+
+“Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from
+home--you said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?--and will
+keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go
+wrong--. But perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any case, of course
+it's a loan, and you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours
+by sending it back when you get to work to make your fortune. And if you
+are doubtful at all, just remember that hopeful little mother of yours
+who sent you over to get what she had never been able to have for
+herself, and who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and
+she named you Harmony.
+
+“I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.
+
+“SCATCH.”
+
+That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson
+feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in
+the draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony
+fought her battle. And a battle it was. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had
+not known everything. There had been no insurance on her father's life;
+the little mother was penniless. A married sister would care for her,
+but what then? Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to
+take her home, and she had--the hoard under the pillow. To go back and
+teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be presented,
+as he had promised her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the
+prestige at home that that would mean, and its resulting possibility of
+fame and fortune--which?
+
+She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she could
+teach English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some of the stores
+advertised “English Spoken.” That would be something to fall back on, a
+clerkship during the day.
+
+Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the
+Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and
+comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with
+most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which
+reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather
+frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.
+
+She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet
+under her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out
+into the cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall
+and listened. She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the
+barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in
+his night attire, his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face
+upraised to the floor above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
+
+When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly.
+His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand. She eyed
+him.
+
+“So! It is the American Fraulein now!”
+
+“I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music.” He
+fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one
+eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.
+
+“She leaves to-day,” she announced, ignoring the knot.
+
+“Why? She is alone. Rosa says--”
+
+“She leaves to-day!”
+
+The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth compactness.
+The Portier jerked at it.
+
+“No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I
+last night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair
+after her! A man in the gateway!”
+
+The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage, which
+had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.
+
+“She will stay if she so desire,” he muttered furiously, and, raising
+the knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and
+sweetly up-curled, stood revealed.
+
+“She will stay!” he repeated. “And when you see men at the gate, let me
+know. She is an angel!”
+
+“And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?”
+
+This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from
+telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one's heart.
+Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day--Himmel, the girl must
+go!
+
+Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and
+expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere a tiny
+room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly
+to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not
+annoy people, that was important.
+
+She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa
+wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it
+was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city--young girls
+of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!
+
+Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she
+could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went down
+to interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the owner
+for the old house.
+
+The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He looked
+past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that the lease was
+up and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight she was not so like
+the angel, and after all she could only play the violin. The angel had
+a voice, such a voice! And besides, there was an eye at the crack of the
+door.
+
+The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a heavy heart
+that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper quarters.
+
+Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
+cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the gutters
+were frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in the mountains the
+day before and hanging from a hook before a wild-game shop, was frozen
+quite stiff. It was a pretty creature. The girl turned her eyes away. A
+young man, buying cheese and tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.
+
+“That's an American girl, isn't it?” he asked in American-German.
+
+The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him, and Rosa
+talked. When the American left the shop he knew everything of Harmony
+that Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called her “The Beautiful One.”
+ Also he was short one krone four beliers in his change, which is readily
+done when a customer is plainly thinking of a “beautiful one.”
+
+Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a stove and
+no objection to practicing. There were plenty--but the rates! The
+willow plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of making the plainest
+garments appear costly. Landladies looked at the plume and the suit and
+heard the soft swish of silk beneath, which marks only self-respect in
+the American woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their
+regular terms until poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then
+at last toward evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the
+corner of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing,
+and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for
+earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.
+
+A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the
+center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear
+higher than the other and twisted one's nose. But there was an odor
+of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many
+previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco.
+Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather faint.
+
+She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity
+of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or
+twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her
+eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a
+cheese and some tinned fish under his arm.
+
+He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.
+
+“Not ill, are you?” he asked in English, and then remembering. “Bist du
+krank?” He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity
+of the “du.”
+
+Harmony smiled faintly.
+
+“Only tired,” she said in English. “And the odor of cabbage--“.
+
+Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand.
+He whistled softly. He had recognized her.
+
+“Cabbage, of course!” he said. “The pension upstairs is full of it.
+I live there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served up with
+pork.”
+
+“I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?”
+
+He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.
+
+“So bad,” he observed, “that I keep body and soul together by buying
+strong and odorous food at the delicatessens--odorous, because only
+rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only
+thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese
+has retired defeated.”
+
+“But I don't like cheese.” In sheer relief from the loneliness of the
+day her spirits were rising.
+
+“Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I
+say--” He hesitated.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Would you--don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?”
+
+“It sounds attractive,”--uncertainly.
+
+“Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?”
+
+Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see
+this brisk young American--young, she knew by his voice, tall by his
+silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could not see his
+face, but she liked his voice.
+
+“Do you mean--with you?”
+
+“I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription.”
+
+That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
+legitimate friends in need.
+
+“I am sure it is not proper, but--”
+
+“Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for professional
+services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced to-night by the
+landlady? Come now--to the coffee-house and the Paris edition of the
+'Herald'!” But the next moment he paused and ran his hand over his chin.
+“I'm pretty disreputable,” he explained. “I have been in a clinic all
+day, and, hang it all, I'm not shaved.”
+
+“What difference does that make?”
+
+“My dear young lady,” he explained gravely, picking up the cheese and
+the tinned fish, “it makes a difference in me that I wish you to realize
+before you see me in a strong light.”
+
+He rapped at the Portier's door, with the intention of leaving his
+parcels there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his arm. A
+moment later Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a bit excited,
+and lovely with the color the adventure brought into her face. Her
+companion walked beside her, tall, slightly stooped. She essayed a
+fugitive little side-glance up at him, and meeting his eyes hastily
+averted hers.
+
+They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the girl's mind
+little Scatchett's letter.
+
+“Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you, call a
+policeman.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were
+gathered miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly
+men--uniformed officers, who made of the neighborhood coffee-house a
+sort of club, where under their breath they criticized the Government
+and retailed small regimental gossip; professors from the university,
+still wearing under the beards of middle life the fine horizontal scars
+of student days; elderly doctors from the general hospital across the
+street; even a Hofrath or two, drinking beer and reading the “Fliegende
+Blaetter” and “Simplicissimus”; and in an alcove round a billiard table
+a group of noisy Korps students. Over all a permeating odor of coffee,
+strong black coffee, made with a fig or two to give it color. It rose
+even above the blue tobacco haze and dominated the atmosphere with
+its spicy and stimulating richness. A bustle of waiters, a hum of
+conversation, the rattle of newspapers and the click of billiard
+balls--this was the coffee-house.
+
+Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony had
+been a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American integrity, in
+spite of the salon of Maria Theresa and three expensive lessons a week
+in German. Harmony knew the art galleries and the churches, which were
+free, and the opera, thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone
+of Austrian life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.
+
+Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and disappeared
+for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of the “Herald.” The
+girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the bright electric lights,
+he was not handsome, hardly good-looking. His mouth was wide, his nose
+irregular, his hair a nondescript brown,--but the mouth had humor, the
+nose character, and, thank Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that
+Harmony saw all this at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables,
+with a nod here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect--a
+tall man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall
+men are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!
+
+The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the points
+of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak to him. The
+shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly the revelation
+was an easement to the girl's nervousness. This smiling and unpressed
+individual, blithely waving aloft the Paris edition of the “Herald” and
+equally blithely ignoring the maledictions of the student from whom
+he had taken it--even Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or
+threatened him with the police.
+
+He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to
+interfere with her outlook over the room.
+
+“Warmer?” he asked.
+
+“Very much.”
+
+“Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They know me
+here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest cakes for me.
+Don't let me bother you; go on and read. See which of the smart set is
+getting a divorce--or is it always the same one? And who's President
+back home.”
+
+“I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?”
+
+“Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take back
+to America with me--one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local
+color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's wife to sit in the
+cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll grow wealthy.”
+
+“But what about the medical practice?”
+
+He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous
+promise of his mouth.
+
+“Why, it will work out perfectly,” he said whimsically. “The great
+American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the
+feeble American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office
+across the street!”
+
+After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation
+until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her
+with comfortable satisfaction.
+
+“Nod your head but don't speak,” he said. “Remember, I am prescribing,
+and there's to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or
+shall I not open the cheese?”
+
+But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something
+inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional
+swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the
+paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded
+room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on
+Harmony's lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes
+that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to
+shift his gaze.
+
+The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the
+unknown protested.
+
+“The function of a coffee-house,” he explained gravely, “is twofold.
+Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation.”
+
+“I converse very badly.”
+
+“So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that well.
+Shall I commence?”
+
+Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why choke
+over conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It was warm
+there, with the heater at her back; better than the little room with the
+sagging bed and the doors covered with wall paper. Her feet had stopped
+aching, too, She could have sat there for hours. And--why evade it?--she
+was interested. This whimsical and respectful young man with his absurd
+talk and his shabby clothes had roused her curiosity.
+
+“Please,” she assented.
+
+“Then, first of all, my name. I'm getting that over early, because it
+isn't much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don't shudder.”
+
+“Certainly I'm not shuddering.”
+
+“I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a German
+uncle of my mother's. Augustus! It's rather a mess. What shall I put on
+my professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus Byrne nobody's fooled.
+They know my wretched first name is Peter.”
+
+“Or Patrick.”
+
+“I rather like Patrick--if I thought it might pass as Patrick! Patrick
+has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that's not bad. But
+Peter!”
+
+“Do you know,” Harmony confessed half shyly, “I like Peter as a name.”
+
+“Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as Peter
+Byrne. The rest doesn't amount to much, but I want you to know it, since
+you have been good enough to accept me on faith. I'm here alone, from
+a little town in eastern Ohio; worked my way through a coeducational
+college in the West and escaped unmarried; did two years in a drygoods
+store until, by saving and working in my vacations, I got through
+medical college and tried general practice. Didn't like it--always
+wanted to do surgery. A little legacy from the German uncle, trying to
+atone for the 'Augustus,' gave me enough money to come here. I've got a
+chance with the Days--surgeons, you know--when I go back, if I can hang
+on long enough. That's all. Here's a traveler's check with my name on
+it, to vouch for the truth of this thrilling narrative. Gaze on it with
+awe; there are only a few of them left!”
+
+Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as the
+strings of her own violin, and under the even lightness of his tone she
+felt many things that met a response in her--loneliness and struggle,
+and the ever-present anxiety about money, grim determination, hope and
+fear, and even occasional despair. He was still young, but there were
+lines in his face and a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less
+frank, she would have known soon enough--the dingy little pension, the
+shabby clothes--
+
+She held out her hand.
+
+“Thank you for telling me,” she said simply. “I think I understand very
+well because--it's music with me: violin. And my friends have gone, so I
+am alone, too.”
+
+He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd without
+seeing it.
+
+“It's curious, isn't it?” he said. “Here we are, you and I, meeting
+in the center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief, both working our
+heads off for an idea that may never pan out! Why aren't you at home
+to-night, eating a civilized beefsteak and running upstairs to get ready
+for a nice young man to bring you a box of chocolates? Why am I not
+measuring out calico in Shipley & West's? Instead, we are going to
+Frau Schwarz', to listen to cold ham and scorched compote eaten in six
+different languages.”
+
+Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She was
+drawing on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the crowd.
+
+Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then,
+seeing Byrne, he waved a greeting to him. Byrne's eyes, from being
+introspective, became watchful.
+
+The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with black hair
+and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He was not alone. A
+slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic, rose when he did and threw
+away the end of a cigarette.
+
+“Why do we go so soon?” she demanded fretfully in German. “It is early
+still.”
+
+He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and eminently
+satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke the other's
+language.
+
+“Because, my beloved,” he said lightly, “you are smoking a great many
+poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to speak to
+Peter.”
+
+The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.
+
+“Who is that with Peter?”
+
+“We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a woman at
+last!”
+
+The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with a slow
+and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed him, and paused
+to apologize, to the officer's delight and her escort's irritation. And
+Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line of annoyance between his brows.
+The girl was ahead; that complicated things.
+
+When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily, with a
+word of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done. He had taken
+the little Austrian's arm and led her by the table while he was still
+greeting her. He held her in conversation in his absurd German until
+they had reached the swinging doors, while her companion followed
+helplessly. And he bowed her out, protesting his undying admiration for
+her eyes, while the florid youth alternately raged behind him and stared
+back at Harmony, interested and unconscious behind her table.
+
+The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned, unsmiling, to
+the other man.
+
+“That won't do, you know, Stewart,” he said, grave but not unfriendly.
+
+“The Kid wouldn't bite her.”
+
+“We'll not argue about it.”
+
+After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.
+
+“Certainly not,” he agreed cheerfully. “That is up to you, of course. I
+didn't know. We're looking for you to-night.”
+
+A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne, but the
+situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.
+
+“I'll be round,” he said. “I have a lecture and I may be late, but I'll
+come.”
+
+The “Kid” was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air,
+angrily flushed.
+
+“You saw!” she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand
+through her arm. “He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before
+I knew you--”
+
+“Before you knew me, little one,” he said cheerfully, “you were exactly
+what you are now.”
+
+She paused on the curb and raised her voice.
+
+“So! And what is that?”
+
+“Beautiful as the stars, only--not so remote.”
+
+In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The
+“beautiful” calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her
+suspicion.
+
+“Remote? What is that?”
+
+“I was thinking of Worthington.”
+
+The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.
+
+In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of
+soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement
+and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He
+drew his chin into the up-turned collar of his overcoat and waited, an
+absurdly patient figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided
+into a rain of tears. Then he took the girl's elbow again and led her,
+childishly weeping, into a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and
+eyes of the Alserstrasse.
+
+Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was
+closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or
+of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather
+puzzled at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation.
+He had suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller's
+narrative of Rosa's account of the disrupted colony across in the old
+lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the
+dark entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
+light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the
+emotional coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God
+save the mark!--her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted
+it: his responsibility, if you please.
+
+He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly well--enough to
+love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and
+passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them,
+or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament;
+the all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher
+than others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt
+Theater, where he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had
+known in Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking
+her own meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater
+she had worn a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.
+
+Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its years
+of coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's new resolution
+that night: this poverty adopting poverty, this youth adopting youth,
+with the altruistic purpose of saving it from itself.
+
+And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story or knew
+her name, Rosa having called her “The Beautiful One” in her narrative,
+and the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition.
+
+Back to “The Beautiful One” went Peter Byrne, and, true to his new part
+of protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and tried to look much
+older than he really was, and responsible. The result was a grimness
+that alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten proprieties.
+
+“I think I must go,” she said hurriedly, after a glance at his
+determinedly altruistic profile. “I must finish packing my things. The
+Portier has promised--”
+
+“Go! Why, you haven't even told me your name!”
+
+“Frau Schwarz will present you to-night,” primly and rising.
+
+Peter Byrne rose, too.
+
+“I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely yard
+alone after dark.”
+
+“Yard! How do you know that?”
+
+Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set on the
+heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of dissolution. It
+took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally furnished an inspiration. He
+indicated it airily.
+
+“Saw you this morning coming out--delicatessen shop across the street,”
+ he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty which the girl's
+eyes seemed somehow to compel: “That's true, but it's not all the truth.
+I was on the bus last night, and when you got off alone I--I saw you
+were an American, and that's not a good neighborhood. I took the liberty
+of following you to your gate!”
+
+He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and said so.
+And in her gratitude she made no objection to his suggestion that he see
+her safely to the old lodge and help her carry her hand-luggage and her
+violin to the pension. He paid the trifling score, and followed by many
+eyes in the room they went out into the crisp night together.
+
+At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of scrubbing
+showed that the Portier's wife was preparing for the inspection of
+possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the stairs by the light of
+a candle, and the steam of the hot water on the cold marble invested her
+like an aura. She stood aside to let them pass, and then went cumbrously
+down the stairs to where, a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other,
+the Portier was frying chops for the evening meal.
+
+“What have I said?” she demanded from the doorway. “Your angel is here.”
+
+“So!”
+
+“She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you refuse,
+because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is again here, and
+with a man!”
+
+“It is the way of the young and beautiful--there is always a man,” said
+the Portier, turning a chop.
+
+His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away,
+exasperated.
+
+“It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate,” she threw back
+over her shoulder. “I knew it from the first; but you, great booby, can
+see nothing but red lips. Bah!”
+
+Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and
+freezing cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter Byrne
+sat and waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the Street of
+Seven Stars, the arc lights swung in the wind.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz, much
+crimped and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head of the long
+table. There were few, almost no Americans, the Americans flocking to
+good food at reckless prices in more fashionable pensions; to the Frau
+Gallitzenstein's, for instance, in the Kochgasse, where there was to
+be had real beefsteak, where turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and
+Christmas, and where, were one so minded, one might revel in whipped
+cream.
+
+The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the center
+of the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with wire stems and
+green paper leaves, and over the side-table, with its luxury of compote
+in tall glass dishes and its wealth of small hard cakes, there hung
+a framed motto which said, “Nicht Rauchen,” “No Smoking,”--and which
+looked suspiciously as if it had once adorned a compartment of a
+railroad train.
+
+Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a
+careful toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But he had
+gone further: He had discovered, for the first time in the three months
+of its defection, a button missing from his coat, and had set about to
+replace it. He had cut a button from another coat, by the easy method
+of amputating it with a surgical bistoury, and had sewed it in its new
+position with a curved surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized
+catgut. The operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with
+the aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he tied
+the ends in a surgeon's knot underneath and stood back to consider the
+result. It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous. After a moment or two of
+troubled thought he blacked the white catgut with a dot of ink and went
+on his way rejoicing.
+
+Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the course he
+had laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive line of thought as
+he dressed. When he was not smoking he was whistling, and when he was
+doing neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers,
+he was swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The
+materials for a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an
+obelisk in a cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive,
+and hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open--one
+window, to be exact, the room being very small--and spends most of the
+day in a warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.
+
+To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except
+subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step by
+step, the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon, weighing,
+considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached as he brushed
+back his hair and put away his sewing implements, was somewhat to the
+effect that he could have done a better piece of work with his eyes
+shut and his hands tied behind his back; and that if it were not for the
+wealth of material to work on he'd pack up and go home. Which brought
+him back to Harmony and his new responsibility. He took off the necktie
+he had absently put on and hunted out a better one.
+
+He was late at supper--an offense that brought a scowl from the head
+of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile. Harmony was
+already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish
+student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of
+language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to
+be again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly,
+aware of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did
+not understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and
+failing that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the
+day. Her bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and rather aloof.
+She ate almost nothing, and left the table before the others had
+finished.
+
+What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing eyes!
+What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with dessert! What
+heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted eyes, looking
+away from appealing ones; lips that tremble with wretchedness nibbling
+daintily at a morsel; smiles that sear; foolish bits of talk that mean
+nothing except to one, and to that one everything! Harmony, freezing at
+Peter's formal bow and gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the
+meal, or no nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering
+the little Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope of a
+glance. And over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the “Nicht Rauchen”
+ sign, and an acrimonious discussion on eugenics between an American
+woman doctor named Gates and a German matron who had had fifteen
+children, and who reduced every general statement to a personal insult.
+
+Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed, and she
+was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one. Defiantly, too, had he
+only known it, her small chin up and her color high again; playing the
+“Humoresque,” of all things, in the hope, of course, that he would
+hear it and guess from her choice the wild merriment of her mood. Peter
+rapped once or twice, but obtained no answer, save that the “Humoresque”
+ rose a bit higher; and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he
+was forced to light a cigarette to cover his pausing.
+
+Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman of
+forty or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a masculine
+disregard of clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let him help her into
+her ulster.
+
+“New girl, eh?” she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door. “Very
+gay, isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that! Honestly,
+Peter, what are we going to do?”
+
+“Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better food, but
+not for our terms.”
+
+Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put it on
+with a single jerk down over her hair.
+
+“Oh, darn money, anyhow!” she said. “Come and walk to the corner with
+me. I have a lecture.”
+
+Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his room.
+There, on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he wrote--
+
+“Are you ill? Or have I done anything?”
+
+“P. B.”
+
+This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the little
+Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said nothing, nor did
+Peter, who rose and dusted his knees. The little Bulgarian spoke no
+English and little German. Between them was the wall of language. But
+higher than this barrier was the understanding of their common sex. He
+held out his hand, still smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took
+it. Then he followed the woman doctor down the stairs.
+
+To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be
+absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts
+an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he
+had offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his
+interest. But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and
+intelligent notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his
+enjoyment of the Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed
+down its involved German.
+
+The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not approve of
+Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of
+fineness in the man himself--an intangible thing that seems to be a
+matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of
+the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.
+
+Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked
+to Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise
+combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that, and the recollection
+that it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics,
+no lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down
+and that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was
+whistling as he walked along.
+
+Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped
+under a street light to consult his watch.
+
+“Almost ten!” he said. “I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie
+I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart.”
+
+“Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?”
+
+“Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make a good
+woman understand that sort of thing.”
+
+“Thank God for that!”
+
+After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the
+“Humoresque.”
+
+Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was
+to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights
+were still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs
+and, for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced
+as out of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.
+
+“'Out of order'!” he observed. “Out of order since last spring, judging
+by that card. Vorwarts!”
+
+They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer played
+golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a
+driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to
+forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular
+development that his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails,
+without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the long steep flights with an
+elasticity that left even Boyer a step or so behind.
+
+Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat
+replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with
+smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the
+sound of beer mugs on wood.
+
+Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men
+bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and
+bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.
+
+“What do I smell, Marie?” he demanded. “Surely not sausages!”
+
+Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old
+friend. It was always sausages.
+
+“Sausages, of a truth--fat ones.'
+
+“But surely not with mustard?”
+
+“Ach, ja--englisch mustard.”
+
+Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on
+Byrne's arm.
+
+“I was very angry with you to-day.”
+
+“With me?”
+
+Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's unconventional
+menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of addressing Marie in
+English, while she replied in her own tongue.
+
+“Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and
+you--She is rich, so?”
+
+“I really don't know. I think not.”
+
+“And good?”
+
+“Yes, of course.”
+
+Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking
+up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard.
+Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She
+had put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones
+were small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.
+
+“I was sad to-night,” she said plaintively. “I wished to jump out the
+window.”
+
+Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.
+
+“And I made you feel like that?”
+
+“Not you--the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I--” She stopped
+tragically, then sniffled.
+
+“The sausages!” she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the
+kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.
+
+Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in
+Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could
+teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of
+clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing,
+offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of
+overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness
+of the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies
+that others may live.
+
+Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness
+which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of
+ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming
+egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.
+
+His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in
+Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means
+at his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne
+was living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in
+winter, starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.
+
+The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury
+of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water
+on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with
+premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been
+a fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a
+reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at
+the same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub
+sizzled if one touched it.
+
+Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom;
+the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress,
+which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again,
+opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room,
+now in chaotic disorder.
+
+Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men already
+there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing
+research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from
+Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne
+stood by waiting for the hand to be played.
+
+The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority. It was
+a regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat
+in Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie's boiled Wiener
+sausages.
+
+The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers.
+MacLean, who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in chips
+with quick gestures of his long pianist's fingers.
+
+Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out, and so,
+after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and fell to betting.
+Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe, and after a second's
+hesitation Byrne turned to him.
+
+“I don't know just what to say, Stewart,” he began in an undertone. “I'm
+sorry. I didn't want to hurt Marie, but--”
+
+“Oh, that's all right.” Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward to
+watch the game with an air of ending the discussion.
+
+“Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been kind
+to me, and I like her. You know that.”
+
+“Don't be an ass!” Stewart turned on him sharply. “Marie is a little
+fool, that's all. I didn't know it was an American girl.”
+
+Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He stayed
+out of the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about the room. He
+glanced into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where Marie hovered over
+the stove.
+
+She turned and saw him.
+
+“Come,” she called. “Watch the supper for me while I go down for more
+beer.”
+
+“But no,” he replied, imitating her tone. “Watch the supper for me while
+I go down for more beer.”
+
+“I love thee,” she called merrily. “Tell the Herr Doktor I love thee.
+And here is the pitcher.”
+
+When he returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The
+cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing
+the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a
+pinnacle of proprietorship.
+
+“Exactly,” he was saying, in reply to something gone before; “I used
+to come here Saturday nights--used to come early and take a bath.
+Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit in a corner
+and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp there, and decent food,
+and a bed that didn't suffer from necrosis in the center. Then when he
+was called home I took it.”
+
+“Girl and all, wasn't it?”
+
+“Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she is. He
+came back last fall on his wedding trip--he married a wealthy girl and
+came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here. There was the deuce to
+pay.”
+
+He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.
+
+“Jealous, eh?” from Hunter.
+
+“Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him--said he didn't
+respect her!”
+
+“It's a curious code of honor,” said Boyer thoughtfully. And indeed to
+none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl of the streets,
+driven by God knows what necessity to make her own code and, having made
+it, living up to it with every fiber of her.
+
+“Bitte zum speisen!” called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and the
+men trooped out to the kitchen.
+
+The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in the
+center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and above all
+sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer, as did the
+others, and sang German songs with a frightful accent and much vigor and
+sentiment, as also did the others.
+
+Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and told
+himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like a prince
+for the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the hollow center of
+his bed, where his big figure fitted as comfortably as though it lay in
+a washtub, and before his eyes there came a vision of Stewart's flat and
+the slippers by the fire--which was eminently human.
+
+However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with considerable
+vigor, that he'd be damned if he would--which was eminently Peter Byrne.
+Almost immediately, with the bed coverings, augmented by his overcoat,
+drawn snug to his chin, and the better necktie swinging from the gasjet
+in the air from the opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours he
+had entirely forgotten Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the little
+Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a shawl over her
+shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire, while in the dining-room
+the little chambermaid cut butter and divided it sparingly among a dozen
+breakfast trays--on each tray two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate,
+a cup. On two trays Olga, with a glance over her shoulder, placed two
+butter pats. The mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a
+keen eye for butter--and a hard heart.
+
+Katrina came to the door.
+
+“The hot water is ready,” she announced. “And the coffee also. Hast thou
+been to mass?”
+
+“Ja.”
+
+“That is a lie.” This quite on general principle, it being one of the
+cook's small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her underling,
+and one of Olga's Sunday morning's indulgences to oversleep and avoid
+the mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and without reply, being
+occupied at that moment in standing between Katrina and the extra pats
+of butter.
+
+“For the lie,” said Katrina calmly, “thou shalt have no butter this
+morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it, wicked one!”
+
+Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.
+
+“The new Fraulein is American?”
+
+“Ja.”
+
+Katrina shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Then I shall put more water to heat,” she said resignedly. “The
+Americans use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!”
+
+Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood with it
+poised in her thin young arms.
+
+“The new Fraulein is very beautiful,” she continued aloud. “Thinkest
+thou it is the hot water?”
+
+“Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?” demanded Katrina. “Go, and
+be less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who rings, but the new
+American.”
+
+Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony's door, and being bidden, entered.
+The room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her nightgown, was
+closing the outer casement. The inner still swung open. Olga, having put
+down her pitcher, shivered.
+
+“Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?”
+
+“Always with open windows.” Harmony having secured the inner casement,
+was wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the faded butterflies.
+Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh. She shook her head.
+
+“But the air of the night,” she said, “it is full of mists and
+illnesses! Will you have breakfast now?”
+
+“In ten minutes, after I have bathed.”
+
+Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen, shaking
+her head.
+
+“They are strange, the Americans!” she said to latrine. “And if to be
+lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows--”
+
+Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had passed
+with the reading of his note, and the sensation of his protection and
+nearness had been almost physical. In the virginal little apartment in
+the lodge of Maria Theresa the only masculine presence had been that
+of the Portier, carrying up coals at ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the
+accompanist who each alternate day had played for the Big Soprano to
+practice. And they had felt no deprivation, except for those occasional
+times when Scatchy developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a
+dancing-hall or one of the little theaters that opened after the opera.
+
+But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman or
+disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown herself
+on the protection of this shabby big American whom she had met but
+once, and, having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of course, that
+she realized her dependence. She had felt very old and experienced and
+exceedingly courageous as she put out her light the night before and
+took a flying leap into the bed. She was still old and experienced, if a
+trifle less courageous, that Sunday morning.
+
+Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls, two pats
+of butter--shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina the thrifty--and
+a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper torn from a notebook:--
+
+“Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company. Will
+you walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to ask you, but
+am spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one remaining American
+suit is being pressed.
+
+“P. B.”
+
+Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:--
+
+“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+“H. W.”
+
+When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway told
+Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her violin.
+The idea of work obsessed her. To-morrow there would be the hunt for
+something to do to supplement her resources, this afternoon she had
+rashly promised to walk. The morning, then, must be given up to work.
+But after all she did little.
+
+For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused outside
+her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter Byrne, listening
+while he sorted lecture memoranda at his little table in bathrobe and
+slippers, absently filed the little note with the others--where he came
+across it months later--next to a lecture on McBurney's Point, and spent
+a sad hour or so over it. Over all the sordid little pension, with its
+odors of food and stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial
+flowers, the music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.
+
+In her room across from Harmony's, Anna Gates was sewing, or preparing
+to sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the room in violent
+disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting savagely at a roll of
+pink flannel. Because she was working with curved surgeon's scissors,
+borrowed from Peter, the cut edges were strangely scalloped. Her method
+as well as her tools was unique. Clearly she was intent on a body
+garment, for now and then she picked up the flannel and held it to her.
+Having thus, as one may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to
+cut again, jaw tight set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a small
+replica of Peter Byrne sewing a button on his coat.
+
+After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong. She
+rolled up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner, and
+proceeded to her Sunday morning occupation of putting away the garments
+she had worn during the week, a vast and motley collection.
+
+On the irritability of her mood Harmony's music had a late but certain
+effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than usual, seeing that
+she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly picked up the bundle from
+the corner. She hunted about for a thimble, being certain she had
+brought one from home a year before, but failed to find it. And finally,
+bundle under her arm and smiling, she knocked at Harmony's door.
+
+“Would you mind letting me sit with you?” she asked. “I'll not stir. I
+want to sew, and my room is such a mess!”
+
+Harmony threw the door wide. “You will make me very happy, if only my
+practicing does not disturb you.”
+
+Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.
+
+“I'll probably be the disturbing element,” she said. “I'm a noisy
+sewer.”
+
+Harmony's immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor
+immediately. She borrowed a thimble--not because she cared whether
+she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the
+game--and settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For
+an hour she plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her
+bow and turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in
+her thread.
+
+“It's in the most damnable knot!” she said, and Harmony was suddenly
+aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.
+
+“Please don't pay any attention to me,” she implored. “I hate to sew.
+That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool
+about music.”
+
+“Perhaps, if you hate to sew--”
+
+“I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate
+being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and
+clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse
+and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!”
+
+Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next
+moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was
+smiling up through her glasses.
+
+“The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm
+really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad
+and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own
+cooking, but what time have I?” She spread out the pieces of flannel on
+her knee. “Does this look like anything to you?”
+
+“A petticoat, isn't it?”
+
+“I didn't intend it as a petticoat.”
+
+“I thought, on account of the scallops--”
+
+“Scallops!” Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from
+them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.
+
+“Scallops!” she gasped at last. “Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting
+'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!”
+
+Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately
+flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little
+adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to
+Peter--Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his
+hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel
+Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had
+the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been
+carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back
+on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces,
+united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the
+hospital. “Although,” she commented, “it looks more like a chair cover.”
+
+Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined
+with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the
+crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the
+mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart.
+And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than
+questioning, the faded little woman doctor knew all the story.
+
+She was rather aghast.
+
+“But suppose you cannot find anything to do?”
+
+“I must,” simply.
+
+“It's such a terrible city for a girl alone.”
+
+“I'm not really alone. I know you now.”
+
+“An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!”
+
+“And there is Peter Byrne.”
+
+“Peter!” Dr. Gates sniffed. “Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any
+comparison in destitution!”
+
+Harmony stiffened a trifle.
+
+“Of course I do not mean money,” she said. “There are such things as
+encouragement, and--and friendliness.”
+
+“One cannot eat encouragement,” retorted Dr. Gates sagely. “And
+friendliness between you and any man--bah! Even Peter is only human, my
+dear.”
+
+“I am sure he is very good.”
+
+“So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I'm a
+skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall in love with
+him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't let him fall in
+love with you. He probably will.”
+
+Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare
+for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that
+a headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised.
+Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the
+afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.
+
+Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner
+she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for
+the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty.
+For illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the
+spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of
+general practice, had come to view life along physiological lines.
+
+With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.
+
+“I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual.”
+
+“Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life--”
+
+“About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool.”
+
+Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best
+tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.
+
+“To whom?”
+
+“To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment
+she thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I said you were
+only human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil--”
+
+“I cannot imagine,” said Peter slowly, “the reason for any conversation
+about me.”
+
+“Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it
+always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then
+she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody
+was good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well.”
+
+“So you warned her against me,” said Peter grimly.
+
+“I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make
+'way with myself?”
+
+“Cui bono?” demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. “The mischief
+is done.”
+
+Dr. Gates looked up at him.
+
+“I'm in love with you myself, Peter!” she said gratefully. “Perhaps it
+is the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold
+water that evening and obeyed little Olga's “Bitte sum speisen.” The
+chairs round the dining-table were only half occupied--a free concert
+had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly
+considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of
+the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room
+far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what
+he had learned during the week--his gleanings from near-by tables in
+coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe,
+where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.
+
+Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met
+a tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was
+talking volubly--as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the
+scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the
+girl. Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of
+the intimacy of the day before.
+
+“Better?”
+
+“Not entirely. Somewhat.”
+
+“I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer
+from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them.”
+
+“I am afraid of headache tablets.”
+
+“Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!”
+
+This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what
+had she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her
+physician. That was all.
+
+“The next time I shall send Olga.”
+
+“Good!” he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as
+he might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her
+new-growing confidence.
+
+It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a
+cigarette--according to the custom of the pension, which accorded the
+“Nicht Rauchen” sign the same attention that it did to the portrait of
+the deceased Herr Schwarz--that he turned to her again.
+
+“I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night.”
+
+Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved
+herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.
+
+“Then you do not prescribe air?”
+
+“That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind my
+going along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else to do.”
+
+Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a swift
+glance of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather
+exultant himself; certainly he had been adroit.
+
+“I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep,” said Harmony,
+who had missed the by-play. “And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice
+companion, I'm sure.”
+
+It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter
+had she followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction
+mattering little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking
+of immaterial things--of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of
+the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the
+Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the
+Benk sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting
+diplomacy to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out
+what was in his heart.
+
+“Look here,” he said, “you don't care a rap about spires. I don't
+believe you know anything about them. I don't. What did that idiot of a
+woman doctor say to you to-day?”
+
+“I don't know what you mean.”
+
+“You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out with
+two premises: I'm a man, and you're young and attractive. Then she draws
+some sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?”
+
+“I don't see why we need discuss it,” said poor Harmony. “Or how you
+know--”
+
+“I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she
+came to me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to you or not,
+but--we'd started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear
+girl, you are beautiful and I know it. That's all the more reason why,
+if you'll stand for it, you need some one to look after you--I'll not
+say like a brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor
+brothers to their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and
+who isn't going to fall in love with you.”
+
+“I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you
+to.”
+
+“Certainly not. Besides, I--” Here Peter Byrne had another inspiration,
+not so good as the first--“Besides, there is somebody at home, you
+understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?”
+
+“A girl at home?”
+
+“A girl,” said Peter, lying manfully.
+
+“How very nice!” said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all
+sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of
+their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers
+and street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to
+themselves. Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked
+blissful personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money--or
+its lack--their ambitions, their hopes, even--and here was intimacy,
+indeed!--their disappointments, their failures of courage, their
+occasional loss of faith in themselves.
+
+The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward
+the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a
+chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of
+the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took
+on, against the gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for
+an occasional pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the
+streets were deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl
+rejected his offer of a taxicab.
+
+“We should be home too quickly,” she observed naively. “And we have
+so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English
+lessons in the afternoon and working all morning at my music--”
+
+And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely,
+his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what
+a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very
+slender her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.
+
+Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep
+into his soul that night.
+
+Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a
+friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they
+were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned
+in at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided
+with Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled
+mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin
+heart in his voice, the barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. He saw
+Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would
+have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.
+
+“It is only the Portier from the lodge,” she said.
+
+The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note,
+stood before Harmony, bowing.
+
+“The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad,” he said thickly. “There is no
+more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has
+only one lung.”
+
+“But think!” Harmony said in German. “No more practicing in the early
+dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is
+better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!”
+
+Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and
+bowed after them.
+
+“Gute Nacht,” he called. “Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the
+salon and a bath of the finest.”
+
+As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his
+unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the
+Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.
+
+“Do you mind if I ask one question?”
+
+“You honor me, madam.”
+
+“Then--what is the name of the girl back home?”
+
+Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine
+names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:--
+
+“Emma.”
+
+“Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!” But there was a touch of
+disappointment in her voice.
+
+Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the
+master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a
+grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano
+had been right--she had the real thing.
+
+The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself
+to an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the
+anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his
+rare enthusiasms.
+
+“Six months,” he said, “and you will go back to your America and show
+them how over here we teach violin. I will a letter--letters--give you,
+and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my
+pupil, is it not so?”
+
+Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with
+the praise and excitement.
+
+“If I can stay so long,” she answered unsteadily.
+
+“You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished
+you talk of going! Gott im Himmel!”
+
+“It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something
+to do I shall have to go back.”
+
+The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse
+his ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He
+spent five minutes in indignant protest, then:--
+
+“But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay.
+Perhaps I can now and then find a concert for you.” It was a lure he
+had thrown out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being
+always eagerly swallowed. “And no more talk of going away. I refuse to
+allow. You shall not go.”
+
+Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was
+interested. He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen
+is fifty Kronen, and South American beef is high of price. He followed
+Harmony into the outer room and bowed her out of his studio.
+
+“The Fraulein has paid?” he demanded, turning sharply to the lady
+secretary.
+
+“Always.”
+
+“After the lesson?”
+
+“Ja, Herr Professor.”
+
+“It is better,” said the master, “that she pay hereafter before the
+lesson.”
+
+“Ja, Herr Professor.”
+
+Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's name.
+There were many such crosses on the ledger.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the
+morning, hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment
+it was over. He had lectures in the evenings, too, and although he
+lingered for an hour or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken
+possession of by the little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for
+things American.
+
+On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and
+helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little
+Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the
+stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.
+
+They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of
+the man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid
+tread. The two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals
+without speech between them were rather for lack of understanding than
+for that completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was
+the first to speak after their greeting.
+
+“Marie all right?”
+
+“Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week.”
+
+“Thanks. Does it matter which night?”
+
+“Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'”
+
+“Say Friday, then.”
+
+Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood
+failed to notice it.
+
+“Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?”
+
+“What was that?”
+
+Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.
+
+“Wake up, Byrne!” he said. “You remember well enough. Neither the Days
+nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you
+go on living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double
+drain there that tells on one--eating little and being eaten much. Those
+old walls are full of vermin. Why don't you take our apartment?”
+
+“Yours?”
+
+“Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and Breidau
+can't take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and we're going to
+Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead enough to take a holiday.
+And if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or
+less, you can have it, and--a home, old man.”
+
+Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted
+him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.
+
+“Thanks,” he said. “I think not.”
+
+“Oh, all right.” Stewart was rather offended. “I can't do more than give
+you a chance.”
+
+They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of Sunday
+had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday and Tuesday.
+The sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and
+the smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in
+depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of
+musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses
+as they worked.
+
+Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his up-turned collar;
+moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather than
+precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a vision of the
+little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the table, and the
+general air of warmth and cheer, and a figure presiding over the brick
+stove in the kitchen. Byrne shook himself like a great dog and turned in
+at the gate of the hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
+
+That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned
+she faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that
+frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against
+barriers of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far
+from absolute cruelty.
+
+She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then, as
+the pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen--also in
+advance,--went on, recklessly. She played marvelously those days, crying
+out through her violin the despair she had sealed her lips against. On
+Thursday, playing for the master, she turned to find him flourishing
+his handkerchief, and went home in a sort of daze, incredulous that she
+could have moved him to tears.
+
+The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up the
+coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the chance of
+seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe
+Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle
+of native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the
+little Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was
+simmering in those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But
+instead he had kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray
+words, odd glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind
+her ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one
+of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in
+troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher
+on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that
+made even that grim official smile.
+
+Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically: so
+many hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many afternoons
+searching for something to do, making rounds of shops where her English
+might be valuable.
+
+And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one
+experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears in her
+eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first interview,
+under Peter's grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper was obviously
+suspicious of Peter. After that, whenever he could escape from clinics,
+Peter went along, but stayed outside, smoking his eternal cigarette, and
+keeping a watchful eye on things inside the shop.
+
+Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was not
+well, from the girl's eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper's face, he
+had opened the door in time to hear enough. He had lifted the proprietor
+bodily and flung him with a crash into a glass showcase of ornaments
+for the hair. Then, entirely cheerful and happy, and unmolested by the
+frightened clerks, he led Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic
+triumph bought her a bunch of valley lilies.
+
+Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very
+bad, indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own
+feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did
+a quixotic thing--which was Peter, of course, all over.
+
+He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea came to
+him there. Hardly came to him, being Marie's originally. The little flat
+was cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened her kitchen, brought in
+a waist she was making and sat sewing while the two men talked. Their
+conversation was technical, a new extirpation of the thyroid gland, a
+recent nephrectomy.
+
+In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She struggled
+with the technicalities of their talk as she sewed, finding here and
+there a comprehensive bit. At those times she sat, needle poised,
+intelligent eyes on the speakers, until she lost herself again in the
+mazes of their English.
+
+At ten o'clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her get the
+stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening beer. He took
+advantage of her absence to broach the matter of Harmony.
+
+“She's up against it, as a matter of fact,” he finished. “It ought to be
+easy enough for her to find something, but it isn't.”
+
+“I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she's rather
+handsome, isn't she?”
+
+“That's one of the difficulties. Yes.”
+
+Stewart smoked and reflected. “No friends here at all?”
+
+“None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home.”
+
+“Could she teach violin?”
+
+“I should think so.”
+
+“Aren't there any kids in the American colony who want lessons? There's
+usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any entertainments
+of the Doctors' Club.”
+
+“They don't want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I could put
+a card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!” cried Peter with a burst of
+honest resentment, “why do I have to be poor?”
+
+“If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money, could
+you?”
+
+Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he found
+in his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was carefully filling
+the mugs. “Why do you not marry her?” she asked unexpectedly. “Then you
+could take this flat. We are going to Semmering for the winter sports. I
+would show her about the stove.”
+
+“Marry her, of course!” said Peter gravely. “Just pick her up and carry
+her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to marry me need
+have nothing to do with it.”
+
+“Ah, but does she not wish it?” demanded Marie. “Are you so certain,
+stupid big one? Do not women always love you?”
+
+Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back to the
+Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest, almost humble. It
+had never occurred to him that women might care for him for himself.
+In his struggling life there had been little time for women. But about
+himself as the solution of a problem--that was different.
+
+He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the girl's
+being willing, was Stewart right--could two people live as cheaply as
+one? Marie was an Austrian and knew how to manage--that was different.
+And another thing troubled him. He dreaded to disturb the delicate
+adjustment of their relationship; the terra incognita of a young
+girl's mind daunted him. There was another consideration which he put
+resolutely in the back of his mind--his career. He had seen many a
+promising one killed by early marriage, men driven to the hack work of
+the profession by the scourge of financial necessity. But that was a
+matter of the future; the necessity was immediate.
+
+The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered Schneeberg
+drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress defended by the
+elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized again. Peter Byrne
+battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he fought he made his
+decision.
+
+He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of
+the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and
+in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost
+ran up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the
+key and he swore under his breath. He slammed the door behind him. Peter
+always slammed doors, and had an apologetic way of opening the door
+again and closing it gently, as if to show that he could. Harmony's room
+was dark, but he had surprised her once into a confession that when
+she was very downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue
+indeed. So he stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from Dr.
+Gates's room across there came a hum of conversation. He knew at once
+that Harmony was there.
+
+Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand over his
+hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries to a proposal of
+marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the door.
+
+Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in
+deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and
+pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still under way.
+
+“Peter!” she cried. “Come in and get warm.”
+
+Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round her
+shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.
+
+“Please go out!” she said. “I am not dressed.”
+
+“You are covered,” returned Anna Gates. “That's all that any sort of
+clothing can do. Don't mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed. Look out for
+pins!”
+
+Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed door
+and stared at Harmony--Harmony in the red light from the little
+open door of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit of white
+petticoat; Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and tied out of her
+eyes with an encircling band of rosy flannel.
+
+“Do sit!” cried Anna Gates. “You fill the room so. Bless you, Peter,
+what a collar!”
+
+No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve of
+proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter, seated
+now on the bed, writhed.
+
+“I rapped at Miss Wells's door,” he said. “You were not there.”
+
+This last, of course, to Harmony.
+
+Anna Gates sniffed.
+
+“Naturally!”
+
+“I had something to say to you. I--I dare say it is hardly pension
+etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say it there?”
+
+Harmony smiled above the flannel.
+
+“Could you call it through the door?”
+
+“Hardly.”
+
+“Fiddlesticks!” said Dr. Gates, rising. “I'll go over, of course, but
+not for long. There's no fire.”
+
+With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.
+
+“Please!” she implored. “I am not dressed and I'd rather not.” She
+turned to Peter. “You can say it before her, can't you? She--I have told
+her all about things.”
+
+Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that night.
+Then:--
+
+“It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment furnished--you
+could learn to use the stove, unless, of course, you don't like
+housekeeping--and food is really awfully cheap. Why, at these
+delicatessen places and bakeshops--”
+
+Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates's quizzical glance fixed
+on him, and Harmony's startled eyes.
+
+“What I am trying to say,” he exploded, “is that I believe if you would
+marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow.” He was talking
+for time now, against Harmony's incredulous face. “You'd be taking on
+others, of course. I'm not much and I'm as poor--well, you know. It--it
+was the apartment that gave me the idea--”
+
+“And the stove!” said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous laughter.
+After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It was real mirth
+with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that curious laughter of women
+that is not far from tears.
+
+Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and made a
+last feeble attempt to stick to his guns.
+
+“I mean it. You know I'm not in love with you or you with me, of course.
+But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might get along. Lord
+knows I need some one to look after me!”
+
+“And Emma?”
+
+“There is no Emma. I made her up.”
+
+Harmony sobered at that.
+
+“It is only”--she gasped a little for breath--“it is only your--your
+transparency, Peter.” It was the first time she had called him Peter.
+“You know how things are with me and you want to help me, and out of
+your generosity you are willing to take on another burden. Oh, Peter!”
+
+And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat the
+laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the cover of
+mirth.
+
+Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them both
+sternly through her glasses.
+
+“Once for all,” she said brusquely, “let such foolishness end. Peter,
+I am ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you--not yet, not for a dozen
+years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not every man can be what
+you may be if you keep your senses and stay single. And the same is true
+for you, girl. To tide over a bad six months you would sacrifice the
+very thing you are both struggling for?”
+
+“I'm sure we don't intend to do it,” replied Harmony meekly.
+
+“Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes, remember
+what I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal to the other.
+Now go away and let me alone. I'm not accustomed to proposals of
+marriage.”
+
+It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself off
+to the bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was as
+comfortable as a washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also Harmony's
+problem was yet unsolved. Also she had called him Peter.
+
+Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of that?
+
+At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to
+warm the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked
+at his door.
+
+“Yes?” said Peter, still comfortably asleep.
+
+“It is Dr. Gates.”
+
+“Sorry, Doctor--have to 'xcuse me,” mumbled Peter from the blanket.
+
+“Peter!”
+
+Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Open the door just a crack.”
+
+Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up
+to retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast from the open window
+blew round him, setting everything movable in the little room to
+quivering. He fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them,
+and yawning noisily went to the door.
+
+Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair was out
+of its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait
+down her back. She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered
+shortsightedly at Peter.
+
+“It's about Jimmy,” she said. “I don't know what's got into me, but I've
+forgotten for three days. It's a good bit more than time for a letter.”
+
+“Great Scott!”
+
+“Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a
+little. The nurse found him crying.”
+
+“The poor little devil!” said Peter contritely. “Overdue, is it? I'll
+fix it to-night.”
+
+“Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I'm off at
+seven.”
+
+“The envelope?”
+
+“Here it is. And take my candle. I'm going to bed.”
+
+That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from the
+twin clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across
+the city. It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a
+candle balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.
+
+He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had
+taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry,
+which weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter
+being strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine
+chamois. Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy's point of
+view and deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a
+harrowing incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a
+sort of glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off
+the chamois.
+
+The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to
+Jimmy Conroy--an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic,
+bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny
+village in the Austrian Tyrol.
+
+It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to
+sleep.
+
+It was just two o'clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her
+ward in the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his
+pillow, and taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended
+fury.
+
+“Now, thou bad one!” she said. “Awake, when the Herr Doktor orders
+sleep! Shall I use the slipper?”
+
+The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.
+
+“I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the
+mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes--”
+
+“The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter of a
+certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father has
+perhaps captured a great boar, or a--a chamois, and he writes of it.”
+
+“Do chamois have horns?”
+
+“Ja. Great horns--so.”
+
+“He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?”
+
+“None. Now sleep, or--the slipper.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+So far Harmony's small world in the old city had consisted of Scatchy
+and the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off in the
+firmament the master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone, weeping
+anxious postcards from every way station it is true, but nevertheless
+gone. Peter and Anna Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds
+held out. To them now she was about to add Jimmy.
+
+The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor's chaos of pink
+flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and complete
+even to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to be presented. It
+was with mingled emotions that Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to
+Harmony the next morning.
+
+“He hasn't been so well the last day or two,” she said. “He doesn't
+sleep much--that's the worst of those heart conditions. Sometimes, while
+I've been working on this thing, I've wondered--Well, we're making a
+fight anyhow. And better take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and
+make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope--”
+
+Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital, meeting the
+doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy's little story quite
+well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.
+
+“Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear,” she had finished.
+“You think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I think I
+have my own little tragedy, because I have to go through the rest of
+life alone, when taken in time I'd have been a good wife and mother.
+Still I have my work. But this little chap, brought over here by a
+father who hoped to see him cured, and spent all he had to bring him
+here, and then--died. It gets me by the throat.”
+
+“And the boy does not know?” Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.
+
+“No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the mountains.
+When we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he was buried. It took
+about all the money there was. He wrote home about it, too, to the place
+they came from. There has never been any reply. Then ever since Peter
+has written these letters. Jimmy lives for them.”
+
+Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that. Peter
+thought thus. A very large part of Harmony's life was Peter in those
+days.
+
+She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for
+Anna Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his
+letter that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of
+the night before. Of the proposal, most of all--it was so eminently
+characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its
+execution. Harmony's thought of Peter was very tender that morning
+as she stood in the arched gateway out of reach of the wind from the
+Schneeberg. The tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made
+her very beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for
+a bus, and stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm, recognized
+and admired her. After all, the American women were chic, she decided,
+although some of the doctors had wives of a dowdiness--Himmel! And she
+could copy the Fraulein's hat for two Kronen and a bit of ribbon she
+possessed.
+
+The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a Dozent
+with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into it, and the
+Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could not marry because
+the hospital board forbade it, made a speech for Jimmy in awe-inspiring
+German, ending up with a poem that was intended to be funny, but that
+made the nurses cry. From which it will be seen that Jimmy was a great
+favorite.
+
+During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a ceremony,
+Jimmy kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates's hand and waited. That
+the letter had come was enough. He lay back in anticipatory joy, and
+let himself be talked over, and bathrobed, and his hair parted Austrian
+fashion and turned up over a finger, which is very Austrian indeed.
+He liked Harmony. The girl caught his eyes on her more than once. He
+interrupted the speech once to ask her just what part of the robe she
+had made, and whether she had made the tassel. When she admitted the
+tassel, his admiration became mixed with respect.
+
+It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the barred
+window behind Jimmy's bed, and brought into dazzling radiance the pink
+bathrobe, and Harmony's eyes, and fat Nurse Elisabet's white apron. It
+lay on the bedspread in great squares, outlined by the shadows of the
+window bars. Now and then the sentry, pacing outside, would advance as
+far as Jimmy's window, and a warlike silhouette of military cap and
+the upper end of a carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events,
+however, were rare, the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and
+the odor of boiling onions from the lodge just inside.
+
+The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the nurses went
+about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a hairpin from her
+hair and made a great show of opening the many times opened envelope.
+
+“The letter at last!” she said. “Shall I read it or will you?”
+
+“You read it. It takes me so long. I'll read it all day, after you are
+gone. I always do.”
+
+Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter's first halting
+lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold. They were mainly
+an apology for the delay. Then forgetting discomfort in the joy of
+creation, he became more comfortable. The account of the near-accident
+was wonderfully graphic; the description of the chamois was fervid, if
+not accurate. But consternation came with the end.
+
+The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The doctor
+read on.
+
+“For Heaven's sake,” said Peter's frantic postscript, “find out how much
+a medium-sized chamois--”
+
+Dr. Gates stopped “--ought to weigh,” was the rest of it, “and fix it
+right in the letter. The kid's too smart to be fooled and I never saw a
+chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns, haven't they?”
+
+“That's funny!” said Jimmy Conway.
+
+“That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake,” remarked Dr. Gates,
+with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to Harmony.
+
+“How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?”
+
+“I think,” observed Harmony, leaning forward, “that little boys must
+not ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is only six weeks
+off.”
+
+“I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the boar's
+tusks.”
+
+For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter of a
+boar, had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of tusks. The tusks
+had not been so difficult. But horns!
+
+Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more questions. The
+morning's excitement had tired him, and he lay back. Dr. Gates went to
+hold a whispered consultation with the nurse, and came back, looking
+grave.
+
+The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.
+
+The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony--to find some one
+worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire of women to do
+something, however small, for some one else. Her own troubles looked
+very small to her that day as she left the hospital and stepped out into
+the bright sunshine.
+
+She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to him.
+
+“Do you wish to do a very kind thing?” she asked in German.
+
+Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea, and
+nay, nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the sun was
+moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was near.
+
+“What do you wish?”
+
+“Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do not
+think--perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not, now and then,
+pass the window? It pleases him.”
+
+“Pass the window! But why?”
+
+“In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and the
+gun.”
+
+“Ah, the gun!” He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an
+officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he
+stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the
+girl knew he would do as she had desired.
+
+That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the professors
+at the hospital desired English conversation at two Kronen an hour.
+
+Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony was
+engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did much more
+than offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her self-confidence,
+although the immediate result was rather tragic.
+
+The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with
+Harmony, engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that
+afternoon. It was the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived five
+minutes late, panting, hat awry, and so full of the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister that she could think of nothing else.
+
+Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her fifty
+Kronen before the secretary as she went in. The master was out of humor.
+Should he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept waiting for a chit
+of a girl--only, of course, he said “das Kindchen” or some other German
+equivalent for chit--and then have her come into the sacred presence
+breathless, and salute him between gasps as the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister?
+
+Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also rather
+tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped
+her bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one's infant
+child from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage
+when with a lady.
+
+The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at Harmony.
+Then with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked to the outer
+room, and picking up the envelope with the fifty Kronen held it out to
+her without a word.
+
+Harmony's world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly at the
+envelope in her hand, at the master's retreating back.
+
+Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled
+together. Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady secretary
+touched her arm.
+
+“It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is sorry.
+You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will be well. You
+are his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat for grief that he
+has hurt you.”
+
+The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary's voice was unmistakable.
+Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the two students who
+had laughed. They were not laughing now. Something of fellowship and
+understanding passed between them in the glance. After all, it was in
+the day's work--would come to one of them next, perhaps. And they had
+much in common--the struggle, their faith, the everlasting loneliness,
+the little white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.
+
+Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of days,
+Harmony went down the three long flights and out into the brightness of
+the winter day.
+
+On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward her,
+giving a definite impression of being bound for some particular
+destination and of being behind time. That this was not the case was
+shown by the celerity with which, when he saw Harmony, he turned about
+and walked with her.
+
+“I had an hour or two,” he explained, “and I thought I'd walk. But
+walking is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk alone. How
+about the Frau Professor?”
+
+“She has taken me on. I'm very happy. But, Dr. Byrne--”
+
+“You called me Peter last night.”
+
+“That was different. You had just proposed to me.”
+
+“Oh, if that's all that's necessary--” He stopped in the center of the
+busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.
+
+“Please, Peter!”
+
+“Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?”
+
+“She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them.”
+
+“For instance?”
+
+“Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes.”
+
+“Never owned anything taxable except a dog--and that wasn't a tax
+anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or
+surgery, where I'd be of some use?”
+
+“She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties.”
+
+“Well, I've got something to say on that.” He pulled from his overcoat
+pocket a largish bundle--Peter always bulged with packages--and held
+it out for her to see. “Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my
+compliments,” he said, “that because some idiot at home sent me five
+pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here,
+I have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian
+customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty.
+I offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it.”
+
+“Really, Peter?”
+
+“Really.”
+
+Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars was
+fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She reached
+over and patted his arm.
+
+“You'll make it up in some way. Can't you cut off some little
+extravagance?”
+
+“I might cut down on my tailor bills.” He looked down at himself
+whimsically. “Or on ties. I'm positively reckless about ties!”
+
+They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that
+eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a
+dog-trot. Peter looked at them critically.
+
+“Bosnians,” he observed. “Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out
+of ten of them tubercular. It's a rotten game, this military play of
+Europe. How's Jimmy?”
+
+“We left him very happy with your letter.”
+
+Peter flushed. “I expect it was pretty poor stuff,” he apologized. “I've
+never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois--”
+
+“He says his father will surely send him the horns.”
+
+Peter groaned.
+
+“Of course!” he said. “Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an eagle?
+One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the
+letter?”
+
+“He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands.”
+
+Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he
+talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only
+there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club
+at home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his
+hobby.
+
+“Scum of the earth, most of them,” he said, his plain face glowing.
+“Dirty little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco;
+and one of them pawned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing
+the game right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them!
+Used to line 'em up and make 'em spell, and the two best spellers were
+allowed to fight it out with gloves--my own method, and it worked.
+Spell! They'd spell their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee,
+how I hated to give them up!”
+
+This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before.
+For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always
+seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother
+attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof.
+Peter felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other
+things.
+
+A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension
+Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in
+ulster and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was
+coming down with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up
+the staircase like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed
+Peter and Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.
+
+“I've been waiting for you two,” she flung at them. “I've had a terrific
+row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!”
+
+It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after
+everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung,
+at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the
+sharp little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly
+heart.
+
+“Sit down, child.” Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. “You are fagged
+out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much
+did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?”
+
+It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.
+
+“I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it
+will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper,
+I'm sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria
+Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for us!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in
+the cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the conversational
+bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.
+
+Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of
+Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars--back, but with a difference.
+True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges, obedient to
+every whim of the December gales; but the casement windows in the salon
+no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of
+rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented
+extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a
+battered but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a
+table with an oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove
+gleamed warm with fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined
+medical books of Peter and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they
+used in common.
+
+Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria
+Theresa. But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the
+stove open, and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed,
+with Harmony playing softly, it took resolution on Peter's part to
+put on his overcoat and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a
+discussion of the function of the pituitary body.
+
+The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only
+greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal,
+which had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they
+bought in quantity and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp
+was a trifle. They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across
+boasted a deer from the mountains. They had other game occasionally,
+when Peter, carrying home a mysterious package, would make them guess
+what it might contain. Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits.
+She knew how to cook rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.
+
+For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing
+to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance
+of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the
+tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch
+him. Peter was firm.
+
+It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.
+
+“Don't be too obstinate, Peter,” she admonished him. “The child needs
+occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the
+financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her
+heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund.”
+
+And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur
+from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna
+almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make
+certain of her usefulness.
+
+A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier
+shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of
+the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the
+Austrians.
+
+The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least
+of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women,
+and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound
+or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was
+growing round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real
+change was in Harmony herself.
+
+The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which
+such changes come--not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath.
+One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion,
+quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional
+introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman,
+tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified
+on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and high
+spirits.
+
+The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had
+been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the
+Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be
+recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every
+odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had
+had a bad week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In
+vain the sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and
+nodded through it; in vain--when the street was deserted and there
+was none to notice--he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the
+pavement outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and
+ringing clang.
+
+In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing
+unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as
+never was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he
+carefully emphasized.
+
+And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the
+aid of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the
+barred window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had
+almost fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the
+manual of arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all
+most exciting.
+
+Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken
+him some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in
+jelly and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had
+been a great success.
+
+It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near
+his heart.
+
+“The horns haven't come, have they?” he asked wistfully.
+
+“No, not yet.”
+
+“Do you think he got my letter about them?”
+
+“He answered it, didn't he?”
+
+Jimmy drew a long breath. “It's very funny. He's mostly so quick. If I
+had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the
+bed. And I could pretend I was hunting.”
+
+Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw
+hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store
+a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head
+down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the
+shop door as if mutely begging admission.
+
+She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.
+Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The
+wild-game seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he
+would mount head and antlers for his wife's cousin in Galicia as a
+Christmas gift.
+
+Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was
+profoundly depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early
+and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile.
+Anna was not yet home.
+
+Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a
+movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.
+
+“Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always
+beautiful, but--you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony.”
+
+“That is because you like me. We always think our friends are
+beautiful.”
+
+“I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful.”
+
+The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table,
+and Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast
+fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few
+street sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from
+the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying
+humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed
+halls, its dark and twisting staircases.
+
+Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with
+the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had
+been growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was
+very comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
+Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are
+written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger
+gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed
+gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship,
+and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does
+not thrive on hunger.
+
+Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the
+struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy
+life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken
+himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the
+luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck.
+So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And
+now!
+
+He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he
+was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands
+hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.
+
+The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features.
+Harmony, knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.
+
+“I think you are sad to-night, Peter.”
+
+“Depressed a bit. That's all.”
+
+“It isn't money again?”
+
+It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before
+Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a
+hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been
+very upsetting.
+
+“Not more than usual. Don't mind me. I'll probably end in a roaring bad
+temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!”
+
+Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested
+a hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.
+
+“I have hurt you in some way?”
+
+“Of course not.”
+
+“Could--could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes.”
+
+“You wouldn't understand.”
+
+“You haven't quarreled with Anna?” Harmony asked, real concern in her
+voice.
+
+“No. Good Lord, Harmony, don't ask me what's wrong! I don't know
+myself.”
+
+He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the
+wall. Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen
+was entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare
+floor and the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and
+the candle when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.
+
+“Dearest,” he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him,
+was kissing her lips, her hair.
+
+Harmony's heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him.
+The gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved
+senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.
+
+After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go.
+Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had
+torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left
+her only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him
+breathing. He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that
+was left in him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms
+again and keep her there.
+
+That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.
+
+She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned
+and faced him.
+
+“That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter,” she said quietly.
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“There isn't any question about it.”
+
+He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still
+obsessed him. “Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If
+there is a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and
+loneliness--”
+
+“It has not made me happy.”
+
+Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual.
+Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He
+knew then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched
+arms.
+
+“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it.”
+
+“I would rather not talk about it, please.”
+
+The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and
+was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and,
+after his habit, shook himself.
+
+“Very well, we'll not talk of it. But, for Heaven's sake, Harmony, don't
+avoid me. I'm not a cad. I'll let you alone.”
+
+There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of
+promise from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered
+the kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an
+already overfed stove.
+
+That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty
+city fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two
+hours later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers
+nothing, the Portier's wife awakened.
+
+The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the
+Portier's wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the
+Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen
+seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he
+ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic
+respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like
+evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.
+
+The Portier's wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing
+to the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping
+that day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty
+air. Words had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in
+unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up--the floor was cold
+and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer
+across the street, as it swung on its hook?
+
+The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron
+candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the
+Portier's pillow. No startled yell followed.
+
+Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier's wife forgot the cold floor and
+the wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.
+
+Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even
+stood open an inch or two.
+
+Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door
+and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned
+kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an
+hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice
+to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain
+swung in the wind.
+
+At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had
+changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert
+Society--What was that?
+
+From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
+
+She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now
+lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with
+suspicion.
+
+“Thou hast been out of thy bed!”
+
+“But no!”
+
+“An hour since the bed was empty.”
+
+“Thou dreamest.”
+
+“The chain is off the door.”
+
+“Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the Americans
+above? Sleep and keep peace.”
+
+He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier's wife crawled
+into her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson feather
+comfort. But her soul was shaken.
+
+The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones out to
+do his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might be told by the
+soles of the feet, which were always soiled.
+
+At dawn the Portier's wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her
+sleeping lord's feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite black, as
+of one who had tramped in garden mould.
+
+Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened the door
+from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set out a pitcher for
+the milk.
+
+On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across the
+street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was written the one
+word, “Still!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps by
+which the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great leaps but
+with a thousand small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves
+its mark, a footprint on a naked soul. We trace a life by its scars, as
+a tree by its rings.
+
+Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and this
+with every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine affection for
+the girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions
+that Harmony's veil had been woven. To Anna Gates, worn with a thousand
+sleepless nights, a thousand thankless days, withered before her time
+with the struggling routine of medical practice, sapped with endless
+calls for sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became
+physiological.
+
+Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was rent.
+
+To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious creed,
+a philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung strange
+bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities, personal
+liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law and the
+prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and her prophet.
+
+In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no mischief.
+Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even in the event of
+the opportunity it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength
+of her convictions. Men love theories, but seldom have the courage of
+them, and Anna Gates was largely masculine. Women, being literal, are
+apt to absorb dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When it is
+false doctrine they discover it too late.
+
+Harmony was now a woman.
+
+Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to
+harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony's eyes
+widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased
+her more than to pit her individualism against the girl's rigid and
+conventional morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable
+argument.
+
+On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took
+place--hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing.
+Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been
+practicing, and at the end she played a little winter song by some
+modern composer. It breathed all the purity of a white winter's day; it
+was as chaste as ice and as cold; and yet throughout was the thought of
+green things hiding beneath the snow and the hope of spring.
+
+Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather
+ashamed of her thought.
+
+“It seems that way to me,” she finished apologetically. “It sounds
+rather silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes
+certain things.”
+
+“And this gentleman who writes of winter?”
+
+“I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one.”
+
+“Indeed!”
+
+“When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it,
+exactly as in books--the difference between a love story and--and--”
+
+“--a dictionary!”
+
+“You always laugh,” Harmony complained
+
+“That's better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in
+this world I want to weep always.”
+
+“I don't find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there
+are good ones.”
+
+“Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose.”
+
+“There are plenty of good men.”
+
+“What do you call a good man?”
+
+Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:--
+
+“Honorable men.”
+
+Anna smiled. “My dear child,” she said, “you substitute the code of a
+gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?”
+
+Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.
+
+“Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!
+When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.
+To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman--and a fifth
+over--for every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples
+there is a derelict like myself, mateless.”
+
+Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her
+resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless,
+brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the
+atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single women were always
+presumed to be thus by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those
+weaker sisters who had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly
+a derelict, frankly regretted her maiden condition and railed with
+bitterness against her enforced childlessness. The near approach of
+Christmas had for years found her morose and resentful. There are, here
+and there, such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives,
+their sole passion that of maternity.
+
+Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her
+resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and
+offered her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of
+the individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and
+though refusing to accept Anna's theories, found her faith in her own
+weakened. She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up
+out of her discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written
+high in its firmament.
+
+When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the
+girl's stricken face.
+
+“I'm a fool!” she said contritely. “If Peter had been here he'd have
+throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and
+theorists are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about
+us--we never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I've
+been talking.”
+
+Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for
+Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony
+from New York. The Big Soprano was very glad to be back and spent two
+pages over her chances for concert work.
+
+“... I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had had the
+money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing 'Brunnhilde,' it would have
+helped a lot. I could have said I'd sung in opera in Europe and at least
+have had a hearing at the Met. But I didn't, and I'm back at the church
+again and glad to get my old salary. If it's at all possible, stay until
+the master has presented you in a concert. He's quite right, you haven't
+a chance unless he does. And now I'll quit grumbling.
+
+“Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely, flushed with
+excitement and having been up since dawn curling her hair. He was rather
+a disappointment--small and blond, with light blue eyes, and almost
+dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn't care how pale a man's eyes were if
+he looked at me the way Henry looked at her.
+
+“They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to be alone
+together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could swallow for the lump
+in my throat, by myself. I was homesick enough in old Wien, but I am
+just as homesick now that I am here, for we are really homesick only for
+people, not places. And no one really cared whether I came back or not.”
+
+Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day before,
+but with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the situation was
+unpleasant and decide to leave? What if a reckless impulse, recklessly
+carried out, were to break up an arrangement that had made a green oasis
+of happiness and content for all of them in the desert of their common
+despair?
+
+If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to argue,
+to justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally. He almost
+groaned aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the wintry garden.
+
+He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his word.
+“I am not a beast. I'll let you alone,” he had said. She had had a bad
+night, as nights go. She had gone through the painful introspection
+which, in a thoroughly good girl, always follows such an outburst as
+Peter's. Had she said or done anything to make him think--Surely she had
+not! Had she been wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.
+
+While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an unaccustomed
+silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron candlestick in
+hand, Harmony, having read the Litany through in the not particularly
+religious hope of getting to sleep, was dreaming placidly. It was Peter
+who tossed and turned almost all night. Truly there had been little
+sleep that night in the old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the kitchen
+while supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories forgotten and wearing
+a knitted shawl against drafts, was making a salad, and Harmony, all
+anxiety and flushed with heat, was broiling a steak.
+
+Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and prayer.
+
+“Peter,” she called, “you may set the table. And try to lay the cloth
+straight.”
+
+Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched
+business of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in mouth.
+
+“Suppose I refuse?” he questioned. “You--you haven't been very friendly
+with me to-day, Harry.”
+
+“I?”
+
+“Don't quarrel, you children,” cried Anna, beating eggs vigorously.
+“Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The Portier loves her.”
+
+“I'm sure I said good-evening to you.”
+
+“You usually say, 'Good-evening, Peter.'”
+
+“And I did not?”
+
+“You did not.”
+
+“Then--Good-evening, Peter.”
+
+“Thank you.”
+
+His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday's
+promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with forgiveness and
+restoration.
+
+“Sometimes,” said Peter humbly, “when I am in very great favor, you say,
+'Good-evening, Peter, dear.'”
+
+“Good-evening, Peter, dear,” said Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving
+smoothly. Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and through
+Marie's frugality and the extra month's wages at Christmas, which was
+Marie's annual perquisite, being temporarily in funds the sky seemed
+clear enough, and Walter Stewart started on his holiday with a
+comfortable sense of financial security.
+
+Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie's temporary
+exile in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of
+the little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with
+long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's
+kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She
+disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there
+was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment.
+Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church
+and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty
+years' accumulation, that “Frank” might catch up with his profession.
+
+She had explained it rather tremulously at home.
+
+“Father wants to go,” she said. “You children are big enough now to be
+left. He's always wanted to do it, but we couldn't go while you were
+little.”
+
+“But, mother!” expostulated the oldest girl. “When you are so afraid of
+the ocean! And a year!”
+
+“What is to be will be,” she had replied. “If I'm going to be drowned
+I'll be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub. And I'll not
+let father go alone.”
+
+Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the
+children gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so
+elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase
+anything abroad. She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest
+her eyes lead her into the temptation of the shops. In Vienna she wore
+her home-town outfit with determination, vaguely conscious that the
+women about her had more style, were different. She priced unsuitable
+garments wistfully, and went home to her trunks full of best materials
+that would never wear out. The children, knowing her, had bought the
+best.
+
+To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is hard to
+say by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory. It
+was as though his own status gained by it. He had much the same feeling
+about the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as
+if irregularity were thus regularized.
+
+Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn an
+experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn
+under her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very pretty, rather
+frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire
+evening.
+
+So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so
+conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart breaking the law and
+trying to keep the letter!
+
+On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There was
+much to do. The house must be left clean and shining. There must be no
+feminine gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely
+masculine establishment. At the last moment, so late that it sent her
+heart into her mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from
+Stewart's watchful eyes. She gave it to the milk girl.
+
+Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr
+Doktor's American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy,
+bound with iron. And with her own clothing she packed Stewart's, the
+dress-suit he had worn once to the Embassy, a hat that folded, strange
+American shoes, and books--always books. The Herr Doktor would study
+at Semmering. When all was in readiness and Stewart was taking a final
+survey, Marie ran downstairs and summoned a cab. It did not occur to her
+to ask him to do it. Marie's small life was one of service, and besides
+there was an element in their relationship that no one but Marie
+suspected, and that she hid even from herself. She was very much in
+love with this indifferent American, this captious temporary god of her
+domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred to Stewart; but
+Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had more than once
+caught a look in Marie's eyes as she turned them on the other man, and
+had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.
+
+When the train was well under way, however, and he found no disturbing
+element among the three others in the compartment, Stewart relaxed.
+Semmering was a favorite resort with the American colony, but not until
+later in the winter. In December there were rains in the mountains, and
+low-lying clouds that invested some of the chalets in constant fog.
+It was not until the middle of January that the little mountain train
+became crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and
+jaunty feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with Alpine
+cloaks and iron-pointed sticks.
+
+Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her life,
+and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very shadow of the
+Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.
+
+Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles or
+so away above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed the cog
+railroad, she had seen its white head turn rosy in the setting sun, and
+once when a German tourist from Munich had handed her his fieldglass she
+had even made out some of the crosses that showed where travelers had
+met their deaths. Now she would be very close. If the weather were good,
+she might even say a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of
+those who had died. It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when
+one has money and leisure.
+
+The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up the
+mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were moments when
+the track held to the cliffs only by gigantic fingers of steel, while
+far below were peaceful valleys and pink-and-blue houses and churches
+with gilded spires. There were vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed,
+and always there were tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a
+child in others; she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched
+him for comfort.
+
+“It is so dark,” she apologized, “and it frightens me, the mountain
+heart. In your America, have you so great mountains?”
+
+Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood racing.
+
+“Much larger,” he said magnificently. “I haven't seen a hill in Europe
+I'd exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the mountains there we
+use railway coaches. These toy railroads are a joke. At home we'd use
+'em as street-cars.”
+
+“Really! I should like to see America.”
+
+“So should I.”
+
+The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America was
+apt to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him, which was
+even worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not repulsed, became
+silent.
+
+At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left the
+train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the platform
+beer and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train resumed its
+clanking progress they ate luncheon, drinking the beer from the bottles
+and slicing the sausage with a penknife. It was a joyous trip, a
+red-letter day in the girl's rather sordid if not uneventful life. The
+Herr Doktor was pleased with her. He liked her hat, and when she
+flushed with pleasure demanded proof that she was not rouged. Proof was
+forthcoming. She rubbed her cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and
+produced in triumph its unreddened purity.
+
+“Thou suspicious one!” she pouted. “I must take off the skin to assure
+thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none.”
+
+“You're a good child.” He stooped over and kissed one scarlet cheek and
+then being very comfortable and the beer having made him drowsy, he put
+his head in her lap and slept.
+
+When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered above
+and the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near. They were
+frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were long lines of
+granite avalanche sheds. The little passage of the car was full of
+tourists looking down.
+
+“We are very close, I am sure,” an American girl was saying just outside
+the doorway. “See, isn't that the Kurhaus? There, it is lost again.”
+
+The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had spoken
+was young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the first time and
+moved to a more decorous distance from Marie.
+
+Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her thoughts
+were busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also and the Herr
+Doktor would meet her. But that was foolish! There were other resorts
+besides Semmering, and in the little villa to which they went there
+would be no Americans. It was childish to worry about a girl whose back
+and profile only she had seen. Also profiles were deceptive; there was
+the matter of the ears. Marie's ears were small and set close to her
+head. If the American Fraulein's ears stuck out or her face were only
+short and wide! But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once
+swiftly into the compartment. She was quite lovely.
+
+Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of stretching and
+yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not speak to the girl;
+Marie noted that with some comfort. But shortly after she saw him
+conversing easily with a male member of the party. Her heart sank again.
+Life was moving very fast for Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the
+train.
+
+Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered his own
+cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels together, a German
+custom he had picked up. The girl was impressed; Marie saw that. When
+they drew into the station at Semmering Stewart helped the American
+party off first and then came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than
+the little Austrian's would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape
+attention, once they were out of the train and moving toward the gate
+of the station. He stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the
+hand-luggage and picked it up again, as though it weighed heavily,
+whereas it was both small and light. He loitered through the gate and
+paused to exchange a word with the gateman.
+
+The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh and well
+up the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated side by side in
+a straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a robe over their knees,
+and a noisy driver high above them on the driving-seat. Stewart spoke to
+her then, the first time for half an hour.
+
+Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered wide
+over the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens, hidden
+from the roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery separated by
+valleys. One might live in one part of Semmering for a month and never
+suspect the existence of other parts, or wander over steep roads and
+paths for days and never pass twice over the same one. The Herr Doktor
+might not see the American girl again--and if he did! Did he not see
+American girls wherever he went?
+
+The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing. Below
+in the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue shadows, of
+cows with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of houses with dark
+faces that opened an eye of lamplight as one looked.
+
+Across the valley and far above--Marie pointed without words. Her small
+heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it, steeper, more
+beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset hue of rose was the
+Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation as he gazed with her. He
+reached over and covered both her hands with his large one under the
+robe.
+
+The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of ecstasy,
+leaned back and watched the mountain; its crown faded from rose to gold,
+from gold to purple with a thread of black. There was a shadow on the
+side that looked like a cross. Marie stopped the sleigh at a wayside
+shrine, and getting out knelt to say a prayer for the travelers who had
+died on the Rax. They had taken a room at a small villa where board was
+cheap, and where the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier
+sort from Bavaria. Both the season and the modest character of the
+establishment promised them quiet and seclusion.
+
+To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury. It clung
+to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor, looked out from the
+back of the building over the valley, which fell away almost sheer from
+beneath their windows. A tiny balcony outside, with access to it by a
+door from the bedroom, looked far down on the tops of tall pines. It
+made Marie dizzy.
+
+She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be unpacked
+and the Herr Doktor's things put away, his shoes in rows, as he liked
+them, and his shaving materials laid out on the washstand. Then there
+was a new dress to put on, that she might do him credit at supper.
+
+Stewart's bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and the
+draft under the balcony door; the light was wrong for shaving. But the
+truth came out at last and found Marie not unprepared.
+
+“The fact is,” he said, “I'm not going to eat with you to-night, dear.
+I'm going to the hotel.”
+
+“With the Americans?”
+
+“Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother--with the young
+man you saw.”
+
+Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to take
+off the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just fastened and
+fighting back tears as she struggled with it.
+
+“Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking.”
+
+“I am not sulking.”
+
+“Why should you change your clothes?”
+
+“Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish to
+wear it.”
+
+Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had walked for
+five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel he found the party
+waiting for him, the women in evening gowns. The girl, whose name was
+Anita, was bewitching in pale green.
+
+That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind once
+more--a perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation, enlivened by a
+bit of sweet champagne, an hour or two on the terrace afterward with the
+women in furs, and stars making a jeweled crown for the Rax.
+
+He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and opening the
+door of the room found her missing.
+
+She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the balcony
+and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold, but she was wise
+with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.
+
+“Didst thou have a fine evening?”
+
+“Wonderful!”
+
+“I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested.”
+
+“Good, little Marie!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+The card in the American Doctors' Club brought a response finally.
+It was just in time. Harmony's funds were low, and the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister had gone to St. Moritz for the winter. She regretted the
+English lessons, but there were always English at St. Moritz and it cost
+nothing to talk with them. Before she left she made Harmony a present.
+“For Christmas,” she explained. It was a glass pin-tray, decorated
+beneath with labels from the Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a
+picture of the Emperor.
+
+The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east
+wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old
+garden gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it. It flew back
+violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in process of egress down
+the walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer, clad as usual in the best
+broadcloth and wearing her old sable cape, made over according to her
+oldest daughter's ideas into a staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the
+path now and Mrs. Boyer was gasping for breath.
+
+“I'm so sorry!” Harmony exclaimed. “It was stupid of me; but the
+wind--Is this your muff?”
+
+Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to
+extract a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down the
+broadcloth. Harmony stood apologetically by. It is explanatory of Mrs.
+Boyer's face, attitude, and costume that the girl addressed her in
+English.
+
+“I backed in,” she explained. “So few people come, and no Americans.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this humble
+apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at Harmony.
+
+“It really is no matter,” she said, still coolly but with indications of
+thawing. “I am only glad it did not strike my nose. I dare say it would
+have, but I was looking up to see if it were going to snow.” Here she
+saw the violin case and became almost affable.
+
+“There was a card in the Doctors' Club, and I called--” She hesitated.
+
+“I am Miss Wells. The card is mine.”
+
+“One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin lessons
+and I offered to come. The mother is very busy.”
+
+“I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can talk
+about it.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the tea.
+She had had no good tea since she had left England, and was inclined to
+suspect all of it.
+
+They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead,
+explaining this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door, here
+an ancient bit of furniture not considered worthy of salvage, there
+a closed and locked room, home of ghosts and legends. To Harmony this
+elderly woman, climbing slowly behind her, was a bit of home. There
+had been many such in her life; women no longer young, friends of her
+mother's who were friends of hers; women to whom she had been wont to
+pay the courtesy of a potted hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas
+or a bit of custard during an illness. She had missed them all cruelly,
+as she had missed many things--her mother, her church, her small
+gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau Professor Bergmeister
+might allay her longing for these comfortable, middle-aged, placid-eyed
+friends of hers. But the Frau Professor Bergmeister had proved to be a
+frivolous and garrulous old woman, who substituted ease for comfort,
+and who burned a candle on the name-day of her first husband while her
+second was safely out of the house.
+
+So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way up the
+stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily
+engaged in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples Harmony
+had had about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to get them
+safely out of the place and to the hospital. So Peter was polishing the
+horns. Harmony had not expected to find him home, and paused, rather
+startled.
+
+“Oh, I didn't know you were home.”
+
+Peter spoke without turning.
+
+“Try to bear up under it,” he said. “I'm home and hungry, sweetheart!”
+
+“Peter, please!”
+
+Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in the salon
+and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But that keen-eyed
+lady had known him before he turned, had taken in the domesticity of the
+scene and Peter's part in it, and had drawn the swift conclusion of the
+pure of heart.
+
+“I'll come again,” she said hurriedly. “I--I must really get home. Dr.
+Boyer will be there, and wondering--”
+
+“Mrs. Boyer!” Peter knew her.
+
+“Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn't it? How unexpected to find you here!”
+
+“I live here.”
+
+“So I surmised.”
+
+“Three of us,” said Peter. “You know Anna Gates, don't you?”
+
+“I'm afraid not. Really I--”
+
+Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost damning.
+
+“She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken me in
+as a boarder. Please sit down.”
+
+Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly puzzled
+at Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two single women
+and one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative strangers, setting up
+housekeeping together had never occurred to her. Many a single woman
+whom she knew at home took a gentleman into the house as a roomer, and
+thereafter referred to him as “he” and spent hours airing the curtains
+of smoke and even, as “he” became a member of the family, in sewing on
+his buttons. There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement;
+merely a concession to economic pressure.
+
+She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but bustling
+about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her cheeks flushed with
+excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau Professor had gone, the
+prospect of a music pupil meant everything. An American child, too!
+Fond as Harmony was of children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who
+walked the parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and
+fixed eyes through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted
+her. They were never alone, those Austrian children--always under
+surveillance, always restrained, always prepared to kiss the hand of
+whatever relative might be near and to take themselves of to anywhere so
+it were somewhere else.
+
+“I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American child,” said
+Harmony, bringing in the tea.
+
+But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the American
+child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked
+most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult
+situation with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea
+was good; that was one thing.
+
+She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the concession
+of putting it on a chair as savoring too much of acceptance if not
+approval, and sipped her tea out of a spoon as becomes a tea-lover.
+Peter, who loathed tea, lounged about the room, clearly in the way, but
+fearful to leave Harmony alone with her. She was quite likely, at the
+first opportunity, to read her a lesson on the conventions, if nothing
+worse; to upset the delicate balance of the little household he was
+guarding. So he stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story,
+while Harmony toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the
+lessons. None came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and put
+down her cup.
+
+“That was very refreshing,” she said. “Where shall I find the
+street-car? I walked out, but it is late.”
+
+“I'll take you to the car.” Peter picked up his old hat.
+
+“Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the
+conductors double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how can
+they when it is the wrong car?” She bowed to Harmony without shaking
+hands. “Thank you for the tea. It was really good. Where do you get it?”
+
+“There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel.”
+
+“I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye.”
+
+Not a word about the lessons or the American child!
+
+“You said something about my card in the Doctors' Club--”
+
+Something wistful in the girl's eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.
+
+After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand and her
+voice was not so hard.
+
+“That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social visit
+and we'll not spoil it with business.”
+
+“But--”
+
+“I really think the boy's mother must attend to that herself. But I
+shall tell her where to find you, and”--here she glanced at Peter--“all
+about it.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Harmony gratefully.
+
+Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and through
+the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind them he turned
+and faced her:--
+
+“You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The result
+was a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She drew her ample
+proportions into a dignity that was almost majesty.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I--I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without
+foundation.”
+
+“I am glad of that.” There was no conviction in her voice.
+
+“Of course,” went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony's sake, “I
+suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is not a young
+woman by any means, and she takes very good care of Miss Wells. There
+were reasons why this seemed the best thing to do. Miss Wells was alone
+and--”
+
+“There is a Dr. Gates?”
+
+“Of course. If you will come back and wait she'll be along very soon.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced that
+there might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the situation was
+anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in that she had lost the
+anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a piece of her mind. She walked
+along beside him without speaking until they reached the street-car
+line. Then she turned.
+
+“You called her--you spoke to her very affectionately, young man,” she
+accused him.
+
+Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some
+perversion of humor seized him.
+
+“My dear Mrs. Boyer,” he said, “that was in jest purely. Besides, I did
+not know that you were there!”
+
+Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged American
+womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and settled its
+broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the cane seat. It was
+outraged American womanhood that flung open the door of Marie Jedlicka's
+flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka's sitting room confronted her
+husband as he read a month-old newspaper from home.
+
+“Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?” she demanded.
+
+Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned to
+meet domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good humor, or at
+the most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.
+
+“I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided.”
+
+“Dr. Gates--Anna Gates?”
+
+“There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I don't know
+their names.”
+
+“Where does Peter Byrne live?”
+
+“In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything to eat
+or do we sup of Peter Byrne?”
+
+Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom of Marie
+Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of the beds with the
+crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing about rooms. There was no
+change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie's tiny
+slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial
+house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it
+hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that
+soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that
+there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential
+qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not
+people? That when grandfather's wraith is seen in his old armchair it
+is the chair that produces it, while grandfather himself serenely haunts
+the shades of some vast wilderness of departed spirits?
+
+Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was
+exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where the most
+orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no attraction whatever in
+the thing they are asked to believe. Mrs. Boyer, who would have regarded
+it as heterodox to substitute any other instrument for the harp of her
+expectation, tied on her gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka's mirror,
+and thought of Harmony and of the girls at home.
+
+She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less shocked
+than she had expected.
+
+“It's not your affair or mine,” he said. “It's Byrne's business.”
+
+“Think of the girl!”
+
+“Even if you are right it's rather late, isn't it?”
+
+“You could tell him what you think of him.”
+
+Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living with a
+representative male had never taught his wife the reserves among members
+of the sex masculine.
+
+“I might, but I don't intend to,” he said. “And if you listen to me
+you'll keep the thing to yourself.”
+
+“I'll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils,” snapped
+Mrs. Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.
+
+We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand painful
+steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked soul. The soul
+was Harmony's; the foot--was it not encased at that moment in Mrs.
+Boyer's comfortable house shoes?
+
+Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on her car,
+went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat, and with the
+sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too indignant to be cold. He
+ran up the staircase, hearing on all sides the creaking and banging with
+which the old house resented a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria
+Theresa.
+
+Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her face
+hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when he entered.
+Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She quivered under it
+and he took it away.
+
+“Crying?”
+
+“A little,” very smothered. “Just dis-disappointment. Don't mind me,
+Peter.”
+
+“You mean about the pupil?”
+
+Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now more than
+ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had stained her cheek.
+She looked rather hectic, very lovely.
+
+“Why did she change so when she saw you?”
+
+Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might have
+said, safe things. Not one came to him.
+
+“She--she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry,” he said gravely.
+
+“She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“But Anna?”
+
+“She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters,” he added
+hastily. “I'll make Anna go to her and explain. It's her infernal
+jumping to a conclusion that makes me crazy.”
+
+“She will talk, Peter. I am frightened.”
+
+“I'll take Anna to-night and we'll go to Boyer's. I'll make that woman
+get down on her knees to you. I'll--”
+
+“You'll make bad very much worse,” said Harmony dejectedly. “When a
+thing has to be explained it does no good to explain it.”
+
+The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As in the
+dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the compelling influence
+of her nearness. He wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life
+before, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bid defiance to
+evil tongues. He was afraid of himself. To gain a moment he put a chair
+between them and stood, strong hands gripping its back, looking down at
+her.
+
+“There is one thing we could do.”
+
+“What, Peter?”
+
+“We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it--it might not be
+so bad for you.”
+
+“But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course, but--not that
+way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry.”
+
+“Not even if I wish it very much?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“If you are thinking of my future--”
+
+“I'm thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you care
+a little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are lonely and I
+am the only person you see much, so you think you want to marry me. You
+don't really. You want to help me.”
+
+Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny his
+altruism.
+
+And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer, compared
+with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the compelling motive
+after all, his need of her.
+
+“It would be a rotten match for you,” he agreed. “I only thought,
+perhaps--You are right, of course; you ought not to marry.”
+
+“And what about you?”
+
+“I ought not, of course.”
+
+Harmony rose, smiling a little.
+
+“Then that's settled. And for goodness' sake, Peter, stop proposing to
+me every time things go wrong.” Her voice changed, grew grave and older,
+much older than Peter's. “We must not marry, either of us, Peter. Anna
+is right. There might be an excuse if we were very much in love: but we
+are not. And loneliness is not a reason.”
+
+“I am very lonely,” said Peter wistfully.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning and
+approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere of mystery
+that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a good night and
+having taken the morning's medicine without argument, had been allowed
+up in a roller chair. It struck Peter with a pang that the boy looked
+more frail day by day, more transparent.
+
+“I have brought you,” said Peter gravely, “the cod-liver oil.”
+
+“I've had it!”
+
+“Then guess.”
+
+“Dad's letter?”
+
+“You've just had one. Don't be a piggy.”
+
+“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
+
+“Vegetable,” said Peter shamelessly.
+
+“Soft or hard!”
+
+“Soft.”
+
+This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be vegetable;
+they could hardly be soft.
+
+“A kitten?”
+
+“A kitten is not vegetable, James.”
+
+“I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!” For by this time Harmony was his
+very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which consisted of Nurse
+Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna and Peter, and of course
+the sentry, who did not know that he belonged.
+
+“Gelatin, to be sure,” replied Peter, and produced the horns.
+
+It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row of
+beds, its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if to add a
+touch of completeness the sentry outside, peering in, saw the wheeled
+chair with its occupant, and celebrated this advance along the road to
+recovery by placing on the window-ledge a wooden replica of himself,
+bayonet and all, carved from a bit of cigar box.
+
+“Everybody is very nice to me,” said Jimmy contentedly. “When my father
+comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who are kind to
+me. There was a woman on the ship--What is bulging your pocket, Peter?”
+
+“My handkerchief.”
+
+“That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief.”
+
+Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood
+up before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward watched joyously,
+while from pocket after pocket of Peter's old gray suit came Jimmy's
+salvage--two nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout
+colonel of hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier
+waiting to go through the various salutations due his rank before
+assisting him. A gala day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the
+little mountain town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if
+one did not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands
+soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was
+much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her
+almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the chair into the smooth
+white bed.
+
+He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of the deer
+beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping
+guard. As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet
+beckoning to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the
+sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the room. Just outside, round a
+corner, was the Dozent's laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where
+he slept, where on a stand was the photograph of the lady he would marry
+when he had become a professor and required no one's consent.
+
+The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which
+kept the boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with Austrian
+intrigue had made him invaluable. He it was who had originated the idea
+of making Jimmy responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly
+Trager quarreling over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or
+brawling over his soup with another patient, was likely to be hailed in
+a thin soprano, and to stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in
+mixed English and German, restored the decorum of the ward. They were a
+quarrelsome lot, the convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling
+disputes and awarding decisions that he slept almost all night. This was
+as it should be.
+
+The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white coat,
+stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous. He held out
+a letter.
+
+“This has come for the child,” he said in quite good English. He was
+obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans
+who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with
+which some day he would marry. He liked the English language; he liked
+Americans because they learned quickly. He held out an envelope with a
+black border and Peter took it.
+
+“From Paris!” he said. “Who in the world--I suppose I'd better open it.”
+
+“So I thought. It appears a letter of--how you say it? Ah, yes,
+condolence.”
+
+Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave it open
+to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent
+read it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of
+sugar. Peter's face was very sober.
+
+“So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?”
+
+“Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a
+baby--went on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her, which
+is a good thing. She seems to have been a bad lot.”
+
+“She comes to take him away. That is impossible.”
+
+“Of course it is impossible,” said Peter savagely. “She's not going
+to see the child if I can help it. She left because--she's the boy's
+mother, but that's the best you can say of her. This letter--Well,
+you've read it.”
+
+“She is as a stranger to him?”
+
+“Absolutely. She will come in mourning--look at that black border--and
+tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the type.”
+
+The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched,
+as does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the gushing letter in
+his hand and thought fiercely.
+
+“She is on her way here,” said the Dozent. “That is bad. Paris to Wien
+is two days and a night. She may hourly arrive.”
+
+“We might send him away--to another hospital.”
+
+The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Had I a home--” he said, and glanced through the door to the portrait
+on the stand. “It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for a
+time. In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a
+fit person the boy could be given to her. It is, of course, an affair of
+police.”
+
+This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
+imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail. He read
+the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy's mother,
+and failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy slept. A burly
+convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general
+appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up
+the blanket round the small shoulders.
+
+“I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day,” said the
+Dozent. “That gives us a few hours. She will go to the police, and
+to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time--”
+
+“In the mean time,” Peter replied, “I'll try to think of something. If I
+thought she could be warned and would leave him here--”
+
+“She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with him
+through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to be there
+for carnival, and the boy will die.”
+
+Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read it
+again in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from it. It spoke
+of the dead father coldly, and the father had been the boy's idol. No
+good woman could have been so heartless. It offered the boy a seat in
+one of the least reputable of the Paris theaters to hear his mother
+sing. And in the envelope, overlooked before, Peter found a cutting
+from a French newspaper, a picture of the music-hall type that made him
+groan. It was indorsed “Mamma.”
+
+Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in order,
+working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel--all in order but
+Peter's room. That was to have a special cleaning later. Next, still
+with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours with her violin, standing
+very close to the stove to save fuel and keep her fingers warm. She
+played well that morning: even her own critical ears were satisfied,
+and the Portier, repairing a window lock in an empty room below, was
+entranced. He sat on the window sill in the biting cold and listened.
+Many music students had lived in the apartment with the great salon;
+there had been much music of one sort and another, but none like this.
+
+“She tears my heart from my bosom,” muttered the Portier, sighing, and
+almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.
+
+After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter's room. She felt very tender
+toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer's visit had died
+away, but there remained a clear vision of Peter standing behind the
+chair and offering himself humbly in marriage, so that a bad situation
+might be made better. And as with a man tenderness expresses itself in
+the giving of gifts, so with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony
+cleaned Peter's room.
+
+It was really rather tidy. Peter's few belongings did not spread to any
+extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the rudiments of order.
+Harmony took the covers from washstand and dressing table and washed and
+ironed them. She cleaned Peter's worn brushes and brought a pincushion
+of her own for his one extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own
+steamer rug and folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove
+in the room; it had been Harmony's room once, and she knew to the full
+how cold it could be.
+
+Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for the
+inner. She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up, when Anna
+came home.
+
+Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came somberly
+back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was making fast that
+day.
+
+“Hello, Harry,” she said. “I'm going to take a bite and hurry off. Don't
+bother, I'll attend to myself.” She stuffed the letter in her belt and
+got a plate from a shelf. “How pretty you look with your head tied up!
+If stupid Peter saw you now he would fall in love with you.”
+
+“Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!”
+
+Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt rather
+better after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off, was busy over
+the brick stove. There was nothing said for a moment. Then:--
+
+“I am out of patience with Peter,” said Anna.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because he hasn't fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?”
+
+“Please, Anna!”
+
+“It's better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it's superhuman of
+Peter. I wonder--”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I think I'll not tell you what I wonder.”
+
+And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna's frank speech, did not insist.
+
+As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna's thoughts
+wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt and back again
+to Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been suspicious of Peter.
+From her dozen years of advantage in age and experience she looked down
+on Peter's thirty years of youth, and thought she knew something that
+Peter himself did not suspect. Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his
+heart-searching for him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony
+and did not himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup,
+revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and grace, a
+thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility she and Peter had
+assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for her letter.
+
+“I've had rather bad news,” she said at last.
+
+“From home?”
+
+“Yes. My father--did you know I have a father?”
+
+“You hadn't spoken of him.”
+
+“I never do. As a father he hasn't amounted to much. But he's very ill,
+and--I 've a conscience.”
+
+Harmony turned a startled face to her.
+
+“You are not going back to America?”
+
+“Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and do go
+I'll find some one to take my place. Don't worry.”
+
+The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came in, and
+there was no time to discuss Peter's new complication with her. Harmony
+and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent. Anna's unfortunate
+comment about Peter had made her constrained. After the meal Peter, pipe
+in mouth, carried the dishes to the kitchen, and there it was that he
+gave her the letter. What Peter's slower mind had been a perceptible
+time in grasping Harmony comprehended at once--and not only the
+situation, but its solution.
+
+“Don't let her have him!” she said, putting down the letter. “Bring him
+here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!”
+
+And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so obvious
+was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and estrays, banded
+together against a common poverty, a common loneliness, should share
+without question whatever was theirs to divide. Peter and Anna gave
+cheerfully of their substance, Harmony of her labor, that a small boy
+should be saved a tragic knowledge until he was well enough to bear it,
+or until, if God so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.
+
+The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind.
+Thus it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials
+of the Votivkirche showed nine o'clock, he did not notice a cab that
+halted across the street from the hospital.
+
+Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of
+him, carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and
+insisting on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to
+say that he had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that
+it was a short stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was
+undoubtedly clothing going to the laundry.
+
+Perhaps--it is just possible--the sentry had his suspicions. It is
+undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with Peter's arm
+close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going
+through the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing
+toward the carriage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg
+sulked behind walls of mist. From the little balcony of the Pension
+Waldheim one looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there
+by islands that were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were
+evergreen trees. The roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the
+horses steamed and sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the
+barking of a dog loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be
+seen. Children cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
+
+During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain
+with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain
+clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the
+slip.
+
+Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close the
+heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the room was
+sticky and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined to the
+house, grew irritable.
+
+Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender
+tenure she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither speech nor
+thought. And the little Marie's love for Stewart, grown to be a part of
+her, was largely maternal. She held him by mothering him, by keeping him
+comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have
+brought him to her in chains.
+
+And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement; he
+resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her unusual
+leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire,
+and stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious
+thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.
+
+On the night of the second day the weather changed. Marie, awakening
+early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the door carefully
+behind her. A new world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering
+branches, of white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe was
+become a garment. And from behind the villa came the cheerful sound of
+sleigh-bells, of horses' feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily
+along frozen roads. Even the barking of the dog in the next yard had
+ceased rumbling and become sharp staccato.
+
+The balcony extended round the corner of the house. Marie, eagerly
+discovering her new world, peered about, and seeing no one near ventured
+so far. The road was in view, and a small girl on ski was struggling to
+prevent a collision between two plump feet. Even as Marie saw her the
+inevitable happened and she went headlong into a drift. A governess who
+had been kneeling before a shrine by the road hastily crossed herself
+and ran to the rescue.
+
+It was a marvelous morning, a day of days. The governess and the child
+went on out of vision. Marie stood still, looking at the shrine. A drift
+had piled about its foot, where the governess had placed a bunch of
+Alpine flowers. Down on her knees on the balcony went the little
+Marie, regardless of the snow, and prayed to the shrine of the Virgin
+below--for what? For forgiveness? For a better life? Not at all. She
+prayed that the heels of the American girl would keep her in out of the
+snow.
+
+The prayer of the wicked availeth nothing; even the godly at times must
+suffer disappointment. And when one prays of heels, who can know of
+the yearning back of the praying? Marie, rising and dusting her chilled
+knees, saw the party of Americans on the road, clad in stout boots
+and swinging along gayly. Marie shrugged her shoulders resignedly. She
+should have gone to the shrine itself; a balcony was not a holy
+place. But one thing she determined--the Americans went toward the
+Sonnwendstein. She would advise against the Sonnwendstein for that day.
+
+Marie's day of days had begun wrong after all. For Stewart rose with the
+Sonnwendstein in his mind, and no suggestion of Marie's that in another
+day a path would be broken had any effect on him. He was eager to be
+off, committed the extravagance of ordering an egg apiece for breakfast,
+and finally proclaimed that if Marie feared the climb he would go alone.
+
+Marie made many delays: she dressed slowly, and must run back to see
+if the balcony door was securely closed. At a little shop where they
+stopped to buy mountain sticks she must purchase postcards and send them
+at once. Stewart was fairly patient: air and exercise were having their
+effect.
+
+It was eleven o'clock when, having crossed the valley, they commenced to
+mount the slope of the Sonnwendstein. The climb was easy; the road wound
+back and forward on itself so that one ascended with hardly an effort.
+Stewart gave Marie a hand here and there, and even paused to let her
+sit on a boulder and rest. The snow was not heavy; he showed her the
+footprints of a party that had gone ahead, and to amuse her tried
+to count the number of people. When he found it was five he grew
+thoughtful. There were five in Anita's party. Thanks to Marie's delays
+they met the Americans coming down. The meeting was a short one: the
+party went on down, gayly talking. Marie and Stewart climbed silently.
+Marie's day was spoiled; Stewart had promised to dine at the hotel.
+
+Even the view at the tourist house did not restore Marie's fallen
+spirits. What were the Vienna plain and the Styrian Alps to her, with
+this impatient and frowning man beside her consulting his watch and
+computing the time until he might see the American again? What was
+prayer, if this were its answer?
+
+They descended rapidly, Stewart always in the lead and setting a pace
+that Marie struggled in vain to meet. To her tentative and breathless
+remarks he made brief answer, and only once in all that time did he
+volunteer a remark. They had reached the Hotel Erzherzog in the valley.
+The hotel was still closed, and Marie, panting, sat down on an edge of
+the terrace.
+
+“We have been very foolish,” he said.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Being seen together like that.”
+
+“But why? Could you not walk with any woman?”
+
+“It's not that,” said Stewart hastily. “I suppose once does not matter.
+But we can't be seen together all the time.”
+
+Marie turned white. The time had gone by when an incident of the sort
+could have been met with scorn or with threats; things had changed
+for Marie Jedlicka since the day Peter had refused to introduce her to
+Harmony. Then it had been vanity; now it was life itself.
+
+“What you mean,” she said with pale lips, “is that we must not be seen
+together at all. Must I--do you wish me to remain a prisoner while
+you--” she choked.
+
+“For Heaven's sake,” he broke out brutally, “don't make a scene. There
+are men cutting ice over there. Of course you are not a prisoner. You
+may go where you like.”
+
+Marie rose and picked up her muff.
+
+Marie's sordid little tragedy played itself out in Semmering. Stewart
+neglected her almost completely; he took fewer and fewer meals at the
+villa. In two weeks he spent one evening with the girl, and was so
+irritable that she went to bed crying. The little mountain resort was
+filling up; there were more and more Americans. Christmas was drawing
+near and a dozen or so American doctors came up, bringing their families
+for the holidays. It was difficult to enter a shop without encountering
+some of them. To add to the difficulty, the party at the hotel, finding
+it crowded there, decided to go into a pension and suggested moving to
+the Waldheim.
+
+Stewart himself was wretchedly uncomfortable. Marie's tragedy was his
+predicament. He disliked himself very cordially, loathing himself and
+his situation with the new-born humility of the lover. For Stewart was
+in love for the first time in his life. Marie knew it. She had not lived
+with him for months without knowing his every thought, every mood. She
+grew bitter and hard those days, sitting alone by the green stove in
+the Pension Waldheim, or leaning, elbows on the rail, looking from the
+balcony over the valley far below. Bitter and hard, that is, during his
+absences; he had but to enter the room and her rage died, to be
+replaced with yearning and little, shy, tentative advances that he only
+tolerated. Wild thoughts came to Marie, especially at night, when the
+stars made a crown over the Rax, and in the hotel an orchestra played,
+while people dined and laughed and loved.
+
+She grew obstinate, too. When in his desperation Stewart suggested that
+they go back to Vienna she openly scoffed.
+
+“Why?” she demanded. “That you may come back here to her, leaving me
+there?”
+
+“My dear girl,” he flung back exasperated, “this affair was not a
+permanent one. You knew that at the start.”
+
+“You have taken me away from my work. I have two months' vacation. It is
+but one month.”
+
+“Go back and let me pay--”
+
+“No!”
+
+In pursuance of the plan to leave the hotel the American party came to
+see the Waldheim, and catastrophe almost ensued. Luckily Marie was on
+the balcony when the landlady flung open the door, and announced it as
+Stewart's apartment. But Stewart had a bad five minutes and took it out,
+manlike, on the girl.
+
+Stewart had another reason for not wishing to leave Semmering. Anita
+was beautiful, a bit of a coquette, too; as are most pretty women. And
+Stewart was not alone in his devotion. A member of the party, a New
+Yorker named Adam, was much in love with the girl and indifferent who
+knew it. Stewart detested him.
+
+In his despair Stewart wrote to Peter Byrne. It was characteristic of
+Peter that, however indifferent people might be in prosperity, they
+always turned to him in trouble. Stewart's letter concluded:--
+
+“I have made out a poor case for myself; but I'm in a hole, as you can
+see. I would like to chuck everything here and sail for home with these
+people who go in January. But, confound it, Byrne, what am I to do with
+Marie? And that brings me to what I 've been wanting to say all along,
+and haven't had the courage to. Marie likes you and you rather liked
+her, didn't you? You could talk her into reason if anybody could. Now
+that you know how things are, can't you come up over Sunday? It's asking
+a lot, and I know it; but things are pretty bad.”
+
+Peter received the letter on the morning of the day before Christmas. He
+read it several times and, recalling the look he had seen more than once
+in Marie Jedlicka's eyes, he knew that things were very bad, indeed.
+
+But Peter was a man of family in those days, and Christmas is a family
+festival not to be lightly ignored. He wired to Stewart that he would
+come up as soon as possible after Christmas. Then, because of the look
+in Marie's eyes and because he feared for her a sad Christmas, full of
+heartaches and God knows what loneliness, he bought her a most hideous
+brooch, which he thought admirable in every way and highly ornamental
+and which he could not afford at all. This he mailed, with a cheery
+greeting, and feeling happier and much poorer made his way homeward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with the
+great chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with cranberry eyes
+for supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree gleaming with candles on
+the stand, and beside the stand, in a huge chair, Jimmy!
+
+It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had been
+shopping and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless, with the
+shops full of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly overburdened.
+There had been anxieties, too, such as the pig's head, which must be
+done a certain way, and Jimmy, who must be left with the Portier's wife
+as nurse while all of them went to the hospital. The house revolved
+around Jimmy now, Jimmy, who seemed the better for the moving, and whose
+mother as yet had failed to materialize.
+
+In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as the
+early twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry kept
+guard and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground men
+wandered about, smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving to
+keep warm, offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, with
+here and there an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home.
+The hospital was always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she
+found it harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be so
+much suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful, insupportable.
+Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital in festivity is very
+affecting. It smiles through its tears. And in every assemblage there
+are sharply defined lines of difference. There are those who are going
+home soon, God willing; there are those who will go home some time after
+long days and longer nights. And there are those who will never go home
+and who know it. And because of this the ones who are never going home
+are most festively clad, as if, by way of compensation, the nurses
+mean to give them all future Christmasses in one. They receive an
+extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,--and they are not the less
+grateful because they understand. And when everything is over they lay
+away in the bedside stand the gloves they will never wear, and divide
+the extra orange with a less fortunate one who is almost recovered.
+Their last Christmas is past.
+
+“How beautiful the tree was!” they say. Or, “Did you hear how the
+children sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think--of
+angels.”
+
+Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,
+and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was to
+play. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon;
+no one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the
+nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.
+Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and
+wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
+imposing audience was the result.
+
+Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats
+rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the
+roof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other
+illumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the
+rows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white
+gowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with
+the red beard stepped out and began to read an address--all caught
+Harmony by the throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt
+rather than heard her soft sob.
+
+Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through
+Harmony's eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away,
+leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of
+humanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be
+counted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early days, when a heart
+was not a pump, but a thing that ached or thrilled or struggled, that
+loved or hated or yearned.
+
+The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning
+festivity into gloom. It played Handel's “Largo”; it threw its whole
+soul into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor
+place, that Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep
+vibration of the cello. Harmony fidgeted.
+
+“How terrible!” she whispered. “To turn their Christmas-Eve into
+mourning! Stop them!”
+
+“Stop a German orchestra?”
+
+“They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!”
+
+The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed
+recitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the
+patients. Then--Harmony.
+
+Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous,
+she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the
+candles burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a
+white coat asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to
+her accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at
+first timidly, then lustily.
+
+Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the applause.
+Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought Peter's, and
+finding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as
+softly the others sang.
+
+“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,”--they sang, with upturned eyes.
+
+“Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht...”
+
+Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in
+which his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a
+Christmas-Eve in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a girl-woman,
+of a still and holy night, of a child.
+
+“Nur das traute, hoch heilige Paar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar Schlaf'
+in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh',” they sang.
+
+There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that night.
+
+Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room, which
+had been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with
+a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony
+brought her small puzzles and together they solved them.
+
+“Shall it be a steak to-night?” thus Harmony humbly. “Or chops?”
+
+“With tomato sauce?”
+
+“If Peter allows, yes.”
+
+Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:--
+
+“Fish,” he would decide. “Fish with egg dressing.”
+
+They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.
+
+The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement,
+but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many and bitter were the
+battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the
+litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.
+
+The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully
+calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on
+which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as
+a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for
+Peter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those
+days. He resented anything that took him from them.
+
+There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was
+failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones
+be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's
+great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built
+his house on the sand, indeed.
+
+So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.
+Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote letters of marvelous
+adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured
+them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of
+his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. “Dad” was
+already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes
+he called Peter “Dad.” At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an
+agony of tenderness.
+
+And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
+Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the
+privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All
+day he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for
+the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming
+only, and sternly forbidden to eat.
+
+A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, with
+a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a
+pair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage was
+on his knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake
+with pink icing. The Portier's gift was a stealthy one, while his wife
+was having coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of
+Christmas does strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was
+roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the
+Portier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that
+only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there was
+a picture of the Christ-Child within.
+
+Young McLean came to call that evening--came to call and remained to
+worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor had
+come. McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, was
+a comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments since
+the day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the hallmark of respectability on
+the household, to restore it to something it had lost or had never had.
+
+She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna put Jimmy
+to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was extinguishing
+the dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean was at the piano,
+thrumming softly. Peter, turning round suddenly, surprised an expression
+on the younger man's face that startled him.
+
+For that one night Harmony had laid aside her mourning, and wore white,
+soft white, tucked in at the neck, short-sleeved, trailing. Peter had
+never seen her in white before.
+
+It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were always
+alert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night he was
+unusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp and watched
+the two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or that, the girl
+bending over a string of her violin. Anna came in and sat down near him.
+
+“The boy is quite fascinated,” she whispered. “Watch his eyes!”
+
+“He is a nice boy.” This from Peter, as if he argued with himself.
+
+“As men go!” This was a challenge Peter was usually quick to accept.
+That night he only smiled. “It would be a good thing for her: his people
+are wealthy.”
+
+Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem. Eminently
+it would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in his well-made
+evening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language of music, who was
+almost speechless over her playing, and who looked up at her with eyes
+in which admiration was not unmixed with adoration.
+
+Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the room and
+took to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each time as he passed
+the door he tried not to glance in; each time he paused involuntarily.
+Jealousy had her will of him that night, jealousy, when he had never
+acknowledged even to himself how much the girl was to him.
+
+Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but that
+night he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the doors. Peter
+came in and sat with him in the dark, going over now and then to cover
+him, or to give him a drink, or to pick up the cage of mice which Jimmy
+insisted on having beside him and which constantly slipped off on to the
+floor. After a time Peter lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on a
+cork floating in a saucer of lard oil, and set it on the bedside table.
+Then round it he arranged Jimmy's treasures, the deer antlers, the cage
+of mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat in
+the room, his dead pipe in his teeth, and thought of many things.
+
+It was very late when young McLean left. The two had played until they
+stopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to bed. From
+Jimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their voices.
+
+“You have been awfully good to me,” McLean said as he finally rose to
+go. “I--I want you to know that I'll never forget this evening, never.”
+
+“It has been splendid, hasn't it? Since little Scatchy left there has
+been no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for some one to
+talk music to.”
+
+Lonely! Poor Peter!
+
+“Then you will let me come back?”
+
+“Will I, indeed! I--I'll be grateful.”
+
+“How soon would be proper? I dare say to-morrow you'll be
+busy--Christmas and all that.”
+
+“Do you mean you would like to come to-morrow?”
+
+“If old Peter wouldn't be fussed. He might think--”
+
+“Peter always wants every one to be happy. So if you really care--”
+
+“And I'll not bore you?”
+
+“Rather not!”
+
+“How--about what time?”
+
+“In the afternoon would be pleasant, I think. And then Jimmy can listen.
+He loves music.”
+
+McLean, having found his fur-lined coat, got into it as slowly as
+possible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in all
+the dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even then he
+hesitated, lingered, loath to break up this little world of two.
+
+“You play wonderfully,” he said.
+
+“So do you.”
+
+“If only something comes of it! It's curious, isn't it, when you think
+of it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and both of us
+working our heads off for something that may never pan out.”
+
+There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not until
+after young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was almost word for
+word what Peter had said to her in the coffee-house the night they met.
+She thought it very curious, the coincidence, and pondered it, being
+ignorant of the fact that it is always a matter for wonder when the
+man meets the woman, no matter where. Nothing is less curious, more
+inevitable, more amazing. “You and I,” forsooth, said Peter!
+
+“You and I,” cried young McLean!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Quite suddenly Peter's house, built on the sand, collapsed. The shock
+came on Christmas-Day, after young McLean, now frankly infatuated, had
+been driven home by Peter.
+
+Peter did it after his own fashion. Harmony, with unflagging enthusiasm,
+was looking tired. Suggestions to this effect rolled off McLean's back
+like rain off a roof. Finally Peter gathered up the fur-lined coat, the
+velours hat, gloves, and stick, and placed them on the piano in front of
+the younger man.
+
+“I'm sorry you must go,” said Peter calmly, “but, as you say, Miss Wells
+is tired and there is supper to be eaten. Don't let me hurry you.”
+
+The Portier was at the door as McLean, laughing and protesting, went
+out. He brought a cablegram for Anna. Peter took it to her door and
+waited uneasily while she read it.
+
+It was an urgent summons home; the old father was very low. He was
+calling for her, and a few days or week' would see the end. There were
+things that must be looked after. The need of her was imperative.
+With the death the old man's pension would cease and Anna was the
+bread-winner.
+
+Anna held the paper out to Peter and sat down. Her nervous strength
+seemed to have deserted her. All at once she was a stricken, elderly
+woman, with hope wiped out of her face and something nearer resentment
+than grief in its place.
+
+“It has come, Peter,” she said dully. “I always knew it couldn't last.
+They've always hung about my neck, and now--”
+
+“Do you think you must go? Isn't there some way? If things are so bad
+you could hardly get there in time, and--you must think of yourself a
+little, Anna.”
+
+“I am not thinking of anything else. Peter, I'm an uncommonly selfish
+woman, but I--”
+
+Quite without warning she burst out crying, unlovely, audible weeping
+that shook her narrow shoulders. Harmony heard the sound and joined
+them. After a look at Anna she sat down beside her and put a white
+arm over her shoulders. She did not try to speak. Anna's noisy grief
+subsided as suddenly as it came. She patted Harmony's hand in mute
+acknowledgment and dried her eyes.
+
+“I'm not grieving, child,” she said; “I'm only realizing what a selfish
+old maid I am. I'm crying because I'm a disappointment to myself. Harry,
+I'm going back to America.”
+
+And that, after hours of discussion, was where they ended. Anna must go
+at once. Peter must keep the apartment, having Jimmy to look after and
+to hide. What was a frightful dilemma to him and to Harmony Anna took
+rather lightly.
+
+“You'll find some one else to take my place,” she said. “If I had a day
+I could find a dozen.”
+
+“And in the interval?” Harmony asked, without looking at Peter.
+
+“The interval! Tut! Peter is your brother, to all intents and purposes.
+And if you are thinking of scandal-mongers, who will know?”
+
+Having determined to go, no arguments moved Anna, nor could either of
+the two think of anything to urge beyond a situation she refused to
+see, or rather a situation she refused to acknowledge. She was not as
+comfortable as she pretended. During all that long night, while snow
+sifted down into the ugly yard and made it beautiful, while Jimmy slept
+and the white mice played, while Harmony tossed and tried to sleep and
+Peter sat in his cold room and smoked his pipe, Anna packed her untidy
+belongings and added a name now and then to a list that was meant
+for Peter, a list of possible substitutes for herself in the little
+household.
+
+She left early the next morning, a grim little person who bent over the
+sleeping boy hungrily, and insisted on carrying her own bag down the
+stairs. Harmony did not go to the station, but stayed at home, pale and
+silent, hovering around against Jimmy's awakening and struggling against
+a feeling of panic. Not that she feared Peter or herself. But she
+was conventional; shielded girls are accustomed to lean for a certain
+support on the proprieties, as bridgeplayers depend on rules.
+
+Peter came back to breakfast, but ate little. Harmony did not even sit
+down, but drank her cup of coffee standing, looking down at the snow
+below. Jimmy still slept.
+
+“Won't you sit down?” said Peter.
+
+“I'm not hungry, thank you.”
+
+“You can sit down without eating.”
+
+Peter was nervous. To cover his uneasiness he was distinctly gruff. He
+pulled a chair out for her and she sat down. Now that they were face
+to face the tension was lessened. Peter laid Anna's list on the table
+between them and bent over it toward her.
+
+“You are hurting me very much, Harry,” he said. “Do you know why?”
+
+“I? I am only sorry about Anna. I miss her. I--I was fond of her.”
+
+“So was I. But that isn't it, Harry. It's something else.”
+
+“I'm uncomfortable, Peter.”
+
+“So am I. I'm sorry you don't trust me. For that's it.”
+
+“Not at all. But, Peter, what will people say?”
+
+“A great deal, if they know. Who is to know? How many people know about
+us? A handful, at the most, McLean and Mrs. Boyer and one or two others.
+Of course I can go away until we get some one to take Anna's place, but
+you'd be here alone at night, and if the youngster had an attack--”
+
+“Oh, no, don't leave him!”
+
+“It's holiday time. There are no clinics until next week. If you'll put
+up with me--”
+
+“Put up with you, when it is your apartment I use, your food I eat!” She
+almost choked. “Peter, I must talk about money.”
+
+“I'm coming to that. Don't you suppose you more than earn everything?
+Doesn't it humiliate me hourly to see you working here?”
+
+“Peter! Would you rob me of my last vestige of self-respect?”
+
+This being unanswerable, Peter fell back on his major premise.
+
+“If you'll put up with me for a day or so I'll take this list of Anna's
+and hunt up some body. Just describe the person you desire and I'll find
+her.” He assumed a certainty he was far from feeling, but it reassured
+the girl. “A woman, of course?”
+
+“Of course. And not young.”
+
+“'Not young,'” wrote Peter. “Fat?”
+
+Harmony recalled Mrs. Boyer's ample figure and shook her head.
+
+“Not too stout. And agreeable. That's most important.”
+
+“'Agreeable,'” wrote Peter. “Although Anna was hardly agreeable, in the
+strict sense of the word, was she?”
+
+“She was interesting, and--and human.”
+
+“'Human!'” wrote Peter. “Wanted, a woman, not young, not too stout,
+agreeable and human. Shall I advertise?”
+
+The strain was quite gone by that time. Harmony was smiling. Jimmy,
+waking, called for food, and the morning of the first day was under way.
+
+Peter was well content that morning, in spite of an undercurrent of
+uneasiness. Before this Anna had shared his proprietorship with him. Now
+the little household was his. His vicarious domesticity pleased him. He
+strutted about, taking a new view of his domain; he tightened a doorknob
+and fastened a noisy window. He inspected the coal-supply and grumbled
+over its quality. He filled the copper kettle on the stove, carried
+in the water for Jimmy's morning bath, cleaned the mouse cage. He even
+insisted on peeling the little German potatoes, until Harmony cried
+aloud at his wastefulness and took the knife from him.
+
+And afterward, while Harmony in the sickroom read aloud and Jimmy put
+the wooden sentry into the cage to keep order, he got out his books and
+tried to study. But he did little work. His book lay on his knee, his
+pipe died beside him. The strangeness of the situation came over him,
+sitting there, and left him rather frightened. He tried to see it
+from the viewpoint of an outsider, and found himself incredulous and
+doubting. McLean would resent the situation. Even the Portier was a
+person to reckon with. The skepticism of the American colony was a thing
+to fear and avoid.
+
+And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just manage
+alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his resources
+to cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had undertaken to
+shield a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he would and could.
+
+Brave thoughts were Peter's that snowy morning in the great salon of
+Maria Theresa, with the cat of the Portier purring before the fire;
+brave thoughts, cool reason, with Harmony practicing scales very softly
+while Jimmy slept, and with Anna speeding through a white world, to the
+accompaniment of bitter meditation.
+
+Peter had meant to go to Semmering that day, but even the urgency of
+Marie's need faded before his own situation. He wired Stewart that he
+would come as soon as he could, and immediately after lunch departed for
+the club, Anna's list in his pocket, Harmony's requirements in mind. He
+paused at Jimmy's door on his way out.
+
+“What shall it be to-day?” he inquired. “A postcard or a crayon?”
+
+“I wish I could have a dog.”
+
+“We'll have a dog when you are better and can take him walking. Wait
+until spring, son.”
+
+“Some more mice?”
+
+“You will have them--but not to-day.”
+
+“What holiday comes next?”
+
+“New Year's Day. Suppose I bring you a New Year's card.”
+
+“That's right,” agreed Jimmy. “One I can send to Dad. Do you think he
+will come back this year?” wistfully.
+
+Peter dropped on his baggy knees beside the bed and drew the little
+wasted figure to him.
+
+“I think you'll surely see him this year, old man,” he said huskily.
+
+Peter walked to the Doctors' Club. On the way he happened on little
+Georgiev, the Bulgarian, and they went on together. Peter managed to
+make out that Georgiev was studying English, and that he desired to know
+the state of health and the abode of the Fraulein Wells. Peter evaded
+the latter by the simple expedient of pretending not to understand. The
+little Bulgarian watched him earnestly, his smouldering eyes not without
+suspicion. There had been much talk in the Pension Schwarz about the
+departure together of the three Americans. The Jew from Galicia still
+raved over Harmony's beauty.
+
+Georgiev rather hoped, by staying by Peter, to be led toward his star.
+But Peter left him at the Doctors' Club, still amiable, but absolutely
+obtuse to the question nearest the little spy's heart.
+
+The club was almost deserted. The holidays had taken many of the members
+out of town. Other men were taking advantage of the vacation to see the
+city, or to make acquaintance again with families they had hardly seen
+during the busy weeks before Christmas. The room at the top of the
+stairs where the wives of the members were apt to meet for chocolate and
+to exchange the addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room
+he found McLean. Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary
+habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for a
+dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to enlist McLean's assistance in his
+difficulties. McLean knew a good many people. He was popular,
+goodlooking, and in a colony where, unlike London and Paris, the great
+majority were people of moderate means, he was conspicuously well
+off. But he was also much younger than Peter and intolerant with the
+insolence of youth. Peter was thinking hard as he took off his overcoat
+and ordered beer.
+
+The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as he
+saw many things. How far his love might carry him, Peter had no idea. It
+seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and studied him over
+his magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly the girl's position, and
+that when he learned it a crisis might be precipitated.
+
+One of three things might happen: He might bend all his energies to
+second Peter's effort to fill Anna's place, to find the right person; he
+might suggest taking Anna's place himself, and insist that his presence
+in the apartment would be as justifiable as Peter's; or he might do at
+once the thing Peter felt he would do eventually, cut the knot of
+the difficulty by asking Harmony to marry him. Peter, greeting him
+pleasantly, decided not to tell him anything, to keep him away if
+possible until the thing was straightened out, and to wait for an hour
+at the club in the hope that a solution might stroll in for chocolate
+and gossip.
+
+In any event explanation to McLean would have required justification.
+Peter disliked the idea. He could humble himself, if necessary, to a
+woman; he could admit his asininity in assuming the responsibility of
+Jimmy, for instance, and any woman worthy of the name, or worthy of
+living in the house with Harmony, would understand. But McLean was
+young, intolerant. He was more than that, though Peter, concealing from
+himself just what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival
+for what he had never claimed. But a rival the boy was. Peter, calmly
+reading a magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip of the
+fiercest jealousy. He turned pages automatically, to recall nothing of
+what he had read.
+
+McLean, sitting across from him, watched him surreptitiously. Big Peter,
+aggressively masculine, heavy of shoulder, direct of speech and eye, was
+to him the embodiment of all that a woman should desire in a man. He,
+too, was jealous, but humbly so. Unlike Peter he knew his situation, was
+young enough to glory in it. Shameless love is always young; with years
+comes discretion, perhaps loss of confidence. The Crusaders were youths,
+pursuing an idea to the ends of the earth and flaunting a lady's
+guerdon from spear or saddle-bow. The older men among them tucked the
+handkerchief or bit of a gauntleted glove under jerkin and armor near
+the heart, and flung to the air the guerdon of some light o' love.
+McLean would have shouted Harmony's name from the housetops. Peter did
+not acknowledge even to himself that he was in love with her.
+
+It occurred to McLean after a time that Peter being in the club, and
+Harmony being in all probability at home, it might be possible to see
+her alone for a few minutes. He had not intended to go back to the house
+in the Siebensternstrasse so soon after being peremptorily put out; he
+had come to the club with the intention of clinching his resolution with
+a game of cribbage. But fate was playing into his hands. There was no
+cribbage player round, and Peter himself sat across deeply immersed in a
+magazine. McLean rose, not stealthily, but without unnecessary noise.
+
+So far so good. Peter turned a page and went on reading. McLean
+sauntered to a window, hands in pockets. He even whistled a trifle,
+under his breath, to prove how very casual were his intentions. Still
+whistling, he moved toward the door. Peter turned another page, which
+was curiously soon to have read two columns of small type without
+illustrations.
+
+Once out in the hall McLean's movements gained aim and precision. He got
+his coat, hat and stick, flung the first over his arm and the second on
+his head, and--
+
+“Going out?” asked Peter calmly.
+
+“Yes, nothing to do here. I've read all the infernal old magazines until
+I'm sick of them.” Indignant, too, from his tone.
+
+“Walking?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Mind if I go with you?”
+
+“Not at all.”
+
+Peter, taking down his old overcoat from its hook, turned and caught the
+boy's eye. It was a swift exchange of glances, but illuminating--Peter's
+whimsical, but with a sort of grim determination; McLean's sheepish, but
+equally determined.
+
+“Rotten afternoon,” said McLean as they started for the stairs. “Half
+rain, half snow. Streets are ankle-deep.”
+
+“I'm not particularly keen about walking, but--I don't care for this
+tomb alone.”
+
+Nothing was further from McLean's mind than a walk with Peter that
+afternoon. He hesitated halfway down the upper flight.
+
+“You don't care for cribbage, do you?”
+
+“Don't know anything about it. How about pinochle?”
+
+They had both stopped, equally determined, equally hesitating.
+
+“Pinochle it is,” acquiesced McLean. “I was only going because there was
+nothing to do.”
+
+Things went very well for Peter that afternoon--up to a certain point.
+He beat McLean unmercifully, playing with cold deliberation. McLean
+wearied, fidgeted, railed at his luck. Peter played on grimly.
+
+The club filled up toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women, wives of
+members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather attentive before
+he met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted bow he gave her. And,
+finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one of the women on Anna's list.
+
+Peter, laying down pairs and marking up score, went over Harmony's
+requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a woman, not young,
+not too stout, agreeable and human. She was a large, almost bovinely
+placid person, not at all reminiscent of Anna. She was neat where Anna
+had been disorderly, well dressed and breezy against Anna's dowdiness
+and sharpness. Peter, having totaled the score, rose and looked down at
+McLean.
+
+“You're a nice lad,” he said, smiling. “Sometime I shall teach you the
+game.”
+
+“How about a lesson to-night in Seven-Star Street?”
+
+“To-night? Why, I'm sorry. We have an engagement for to-night.”
+
+The “we” was deliberate and cruel. McLean writhed. Also the statement
+was false, but the boy was spared that knowledge for the moment.
+
+Things went well. Dr. Jennings was badly off for quarters. She would
+make a change if she could better herself. Peter drew her off to a
+corner and stated his case. She listened attentively, albeit not without
+disapproval.
+
+She frankly discredited the altruism of Peter's motives when he told
+her about Harmony. But as the recital went on she found herself rather
+touched. The story of Jimmy appealed to her. She scolded and lauded
+Peter in one breath, and what was more to the point, she promised to
+visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse the next day.
+
+“So Anna Gates has gone home!” she reflected. “When?”
+
+“This morning.”
+
+“Then the girl is there alone?”
+
+“Yes. She is very young and inexperienced, and the boy--it's
+myocarditis. She's afraid to be left with him.”
+
+“Is she quite alone?”
+
+“Absolutely, and without funds, except enough for her lessons. Our
+arrangement was that she should keep the house going; that was her
+share.”
+
+Dr. Jennings was impressed. It was impossible to talk to Peter and not
+believe him. Women trusted Peter always.
+
+“You've been very foolish, Dr. Byrne,” she said as she rose; “but you've
+been disinterested enough to offset that and to put some of us to shame.
+To-morrow at three, if it suits you. You said the Siebensternstrasse?”
+
+Peter went home exultant.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Christmas-Day had had a softening effect on Mrs. Boyer. It had opened
+badly. It was the first Christmas she had spent away from her children,
+and there had been little of the holiday spirit in her attitude as she
+prepared the Christmas breakfast. After that, however, things happened.
+
+In the first place, under her plate she had found a frivolous chain and
+pendant which she had admired. And when her eyes filled up, as they did
+whenever she was emotionally moved, the doctor had come round the table
+and put both his arms about her.
+
+“Too young for you? Not a bit!” he said heartily. “You're better-looking
+then you ever were, Jennie; and if you weren't you're the only woman for
+me, anyhow. Don't you think I realize what this exile means to you and
+that you're doing it for me?”
+
+“I--I don't mind it.”
+
+“Yes, you do. To-night we'll go out and make a night of it, shall we?
+Supper at the Grand, the theater, and then the Tabarin, eh?”
+
+She loosened herself from his arms.
+
+“What shall I wear? Those horrible things the children bought me--”
+
+“Throw 'em away.”
+
+“They're not worn at all.”
+
+“Throw them out. Get rid of the things the children got you. Go out
+to-morrow and buy something you like--not that I don't like you in
+anything or without--”
+
+“Frank!”
+
+“Be happy, that's the thing. It's the first Christmas without the
+family, and I miss them too. But we're together, dear. That's the big
+thing. Merry Christmas.”
+
+An auspicious opening, that, to Christmas-Day. And they had carried
+out the program as outlined. Mrs. Boyer had enjoyed it, albeit a bit
+horrified at the Christmas gayety at the Tabarin.
+
+The next morning, however, she awakened with a keen reaction. Her head
+ached. She had a sense of taint over her. She was virtue rampant
+again, as on the day she had first visited the old lodge in the
+Siebensternstrasse.
+
+It is hardly astonishing that by association of ideas Harmony came
+into her mind again, a brand that might even yet be snatched from the
+burning. She had been a bit hasty before, she admitted to herself. There
+was a woman doctor named Gates, although her address at the club was
+given as Pension Schwarz. She determined to do her shopping early and
+then to visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard
+woman, for all her inflexible morality, and more than once she had
+had an uneasy memory of Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face
+the afternoon of her visit. She had been a watchful mother over a not
+particularly handsome family of daughters. This lovely young girl needed
+mothering and she had refused it. She would go back, and if she found
+she had been wrong and the girl was deserving and honest, she would see
+what could be done.
+
+The day was wretched. The snow had turned to rain. Mrs. Boyer, shopping,
+dragged wet skirts and damp feet from store to store. She found nothing
+that she cared for after all. The garments that looked chic in the
+windows or on manikins in the shops, were absurd on her. Her insistent
+bosom bulged, straight lines became curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets
+gaped, collars choked her or shocked her by their absence. In the mirror
+of Marie Jedlicka, clad in familiar garments that had accommodated
+themselves to the idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump,
+rather comely matron. Here before the plate glass of the modiste, under
+the glare of a hundred lights, side by side with a slim Austrian girl
+who looked like a willow wand, Mrs. Boyer was grotesque, ridiculous,
+monstrous. She shuddered. She almost wept.
+
+It was bad preparation for a visit to the Siebensternstrasse. Mrs.
+Boyer, finding her vanity gone, convinced that she was an absurdity
+physically, fell back for comfort on her soul. She had been a good wife
+and mother; she was chaste, righteous. God had been cruel to her in the
+flesh, but He had given her the spirit.
+
+“Madame wishes not the gown? It is beautiful--see the embroidery! And
+the neck may be filled with chiffon.”
+
+“Young woman,” she said grimly, “I see the embroidery; and the neck
+may be filled with chiffon, but not for me! And when you have had five
+children, you will not buy clothes like that either.”
+
+All the kindliness was gone from the visit to the Siebensternstrasse;
+only the determination remained. Wounded to the heart of her
+self-esteem, her pride in tatters, she took her way to the old lodge and
+climbed the stairs.
+
+She found a condition of mild excitement. Jimmy had slept long after his
+bath. Harmony practiced, cut up a chicken for broth, aired blankets for
+the chair into which Peter on his return was to lift the boy.
+
+She was called to inspect the mouse-cage, which, according to Jimmy, had
+strawberries in it.
+
+“Far back,” he explained. “There in the cotton, Harry.”
+
+But it was not strawberries. Harmony opened the cage and very tenderly
+took out the cotton nest. Eight tiny pink baby mice, clean washed by the
+mother, lay curled in a heap.
+
+It was a stupendous moment. The joy of vicarious parentage was Jimmy's.
+He named them all immediately and demanded food for them. On Harmony's
+delicate explanation that this was unnecessary, life took on a new
+meaning for Jimmy. He watched the mother lest she slight one. His
+responsibility weighed on him. Also his inquiring mind was very busy.
+
+“But how did they get there?” he demanded.
+
+“God sent them, just as he sends babies of all sorts.”
+
+“Did he send me?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“That's a good one on you, Harry. My father found me in a hollow tree.”
+
+“But don't you think God had something to do with it?”
+
+Jimmy pondered this.
+
+“I suppose,” he reflected, “God sent Daddy to find me so that I would be
+his little boy. You never happened to see any babies when you were out
+walking, did you, Harry?”
+
+“Not in stumps--but I probably wasn't looking.”
+
+Jimmy eyed her with sympathy.
+
+“You may some day. Would you like to have one?”
+
+“Very much,” said Harmony, and flushed delightfully.
+
+Jimmy was disposed to press the matter, to urge immediate maternity on
+her.
+
+“You could lay it here on the bed,” he offered, “and I'd watch it. When
+they yell you let 'em suck your finger. I knew a woman once that had a
+baby and she did that. And it could watch Isabella.” Isabella was the
+mother mouse. “And when I'm better I could take it walking.”
+
+“That,” said Harmony gravely, “is mighty fine of you, Jimmy boy. I--I'll
+think about it.” She never denied Jimmy anything, so now she temporized.
+
+“I'll ask Peter.”
+
+Harmony had a half-hysterical moment; then:
+
+“Wouldn't it be better,” she asked, “to keep anything of that sort a
+secret? And to surprise Peter?”
+
+The boy loved a secret. He played with it in lieu of other occupation.
+His uncertain future was sown thick with secrets that would never flower
+into reality. Thus Peter had shamelessly promised him a visit to the
+circus when he was able to go, Harmony not to be told until the tickets
+were bought. Anna had similarly promised to send him from America a
+pitcher's glove and a baseball bat. To this list of futurities he now
+added Harmony's baby.
+
+Harmony brought in her violin and played softly to him, not to disturb
+the sleeping mice. She sang, too, a verse that the Big Soprano had been
+fond of and that Jimmy loved. Not much of a voice was Harmony's, but
+sweet and low and very true, as became her violinist's ear.
+
+  “Ah, well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+   Deeply buried from human eyes,”
+
+she sang, her clear eyes luminous.
+
+  “And in the hereafter, angels may
+   Roll the stone from its grave away!”
+
+Mrs. Boyer mounted the stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She had
+snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although that very
+morning she had detested the suit, her round of shopping had again
+endeared it to her. She told the Portier in English what she thought
+of him, and climbed ponderously, pausing at each landing to examine the
+damage.
+
+Harmony, having sung Jimmy to sleep, was in the throes of an experiment.
+She was trying to smoke.
+
+A very human young person was Harmony, apt to be exceedingly wretched
+if her hat were of last year's fashion, anxious to be inconspicuous by
+doing what every one else was doing, conventional as are the very young,
+fearful of being an exception.
+
+And nearly every one was smoking. Many of the young women whom she met
+at the master's house had yellowed fingers and smoked in the anteroom;
+the Big Soprano had smoked; Anna and Scatchy had smoked; in the
+coffee-houses milliners' apprentices produced little silver mouth-pieces
+to prevent soiling their pretty lips and smoked endlessly. Even Peter
+had admitted that it was not a vice, but only a comfortable bad habit.
+And Anna had left a handful of cigarettes.
+
+Harmony was not smoking; she was experimenting. Peter and Anna had
+smoked together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without reasoning
+it out, Harmony was experimenting toward the end of establishing her
+relations with Peter still further on friendly and comradely grounds.
+Two men might smoke together; a man and a woman might smoke together
+as friends. According to Harmony's ideas, a girl paring potatoes might
+inspire sentiment, but smoking a cigarette--never!
+
+She did not like it. She thought, standing before her little mirror,
+that she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her lips together,
+as she had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke in a thin line. She
+smoked very hard, so that she stood in the center of a gray nimbus. She
+hated it, but she persisted. Perhaps it grew on one; perhaps, also,
+if she walked about it would choke her less. She practiced holding the
+thing between her first and second fingers, and found that easier than
+smoking. Then she went to the salon where there was more air, and tried
+exhaling through her nose. It made her sneeze.
+
+On the sneeze came Mrs. Boyer's ring. Harmony thought very fast. It
+might be the bread or the milk, but again--She flung the cigarette into
+the stove, shut the door, and answered the bell.
+
+Mrs. Boyer's greeting was colder than she had intended. It put Harmony
+on the defensive at once, made her uncomfortable. Like all the innocent
+falsely accused she looked guiltier than the guiltiest. Under Mrs.
+Boyer's searching eyes the enormity of her situation overwhelmed her.
+And over all, through salon and passage, hung the damning odor of the
+cigarette. Harmony, leading the way in, was a sheep before her shearer.
+
+“I'm calling on all of you,” said Mrs. Boyer, sniping. “I meant to bring
+Dr. Boyer's cards for every one, including Dr. Byrne.”
+
+“I'm sorry. Dr. Byrne is out.”
+
+“And Dr. Gates?”
+
+“She--she is away.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously changed the subject,
+requesting a needle and thread to draw the rent together. It had been in
+Harmony's mind to explain the situation, to show Jimmy to Mrs. Boyer,
+to throw herself on the older woman's sympathy, to ask advice. But
+the visitor's attitude made this difficult. To add to her discomfort,
+through the grating in the stove door was coming a thin thread of smoke.
+
+It was, after all, Mrs. Boyer who broached the subject again. She had
+had a cup of tea, and Harmony, sitting on a stool, had mended the rent
+so that it could hardly be seen. Mrs. Boyer, softened by the tea and by
+the proximity of Harmony's lovely head bent over her task, grew slightly
+more expansive.
+
+“I ought to tell you something, Miss Wells,” she said. “You remember my
+other visit?”
+
+“Perfectly.” Harmony bent still lower.
+
+“I did you an injustice at that time. I've been sorry ever since. I
+thought that there was no Dr. Gates. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to
+deny it. People do things in this wicked city that they wouldn't do at
+home. I confess I misjudged Peter Byrne. You can give him my apologies,
+since he won't see me.”
+
+“But he isn't here or of course he'd see you.”
+
+“Then,” demanded Mrs. Boyer grimly, “if Peter Byrne is not here, who has
+been smoking cigarettes in this room? There is one still burning in that
+stove!”
+
+Harmony's hand was forced. She was white as she cut the brown-silk
+thread and rose to her feet.
+
+“I think,” she said, “that I'd better go back a few weeks, Mrs. Boyer,
+and tell you a story, if you have time to listen.”
+
+“If it is disagreeable--”
+
+“Not at all. It is about Peter Byrne and myself, and--some others. It
+is really about Peter. Mrs. Boyer, will you come very quietly across the
+hall?”
+
+Mrs. Boyer, expecting Heaven knows what, rose with celerity. Harmony
+led the way to Jimmy's door and opened it. He was still asleep, a wasted
+small figure on the narrow bed. Beside him the mice frolicked in their
+cage, the sentry kept guard over Peter's shameless letters from the
+Tyrol, the strawberry babies wriggled in their cotton.
+
+“We are not going to have him very long,” said Harmony softly. “Peter is
+making him happy for a little while.”
+
+Back in the salon of Maria Theresa she told the whole story. Mrs. Boyer
+found it very affecting. Harmony sat beside her on a stool and she kept
+her hand on the girl's shoulder. When the narrative reached Anna's
+going away, however, she took it away. From that point on she sat
+uncompromisingly rigid and listened.
+
+“Then you mean to say,” she exploded when Harmony had finished, “that
+you intend to stay on here, just the two of you?”
+
+“And Jimmy.”
+
+“Bah! What has the child to do with it?”
+
+“We will find some one to take Anna's place.”
+
+“I doubt it. And until you do?”
+
+“There is nothing wicked in what we are doing. Don't you see, Mrs.
+Boyer, I can't leave the boy.”
+
+“Since Peter is so altruistic, let him hire a nurse.”
+
+Bad as things were, Harmony smiled.
+
+“A nurse!” she said. “Why, do you realize that he is keeping three
+people now on what is starvation for one?”
+
+“Then he's a fool!” Mrs. Boyer rose in majesty. “I'm not going to leave
+you here.”
+
+“I'm sorry. You must see--”
+
+“I see nothing but a girl deliberately putting herself in a compromising
+portion and worse.”
+
+“Mrs. Boyer!”
+
+“Get your things on. I guess Dr. Boyer and I can look after you until we
+can send you home.”
+
+“I am not going home--yet,” said poor Harmony, biting her lip to steady
+it.
+
+Back and forth waged the battle, Mrs. Boyer assailing, Harmony offering
+little defense but standing firm on her refusal to go as long as Peter
+would let her remain.
+
+“It means so much to me,” she ventured, goaded. “And I earn my lodging
+and board. I work hard and--I make him comfortable. It costs him very
+little and I give him something in exchange. All men are not alike. If
+the sort you have known are--are different--”
+
+This was unfortunate. Mrs. Boyer stiffened. She ceased offensive
+tactics, and retired grimly into the dignity of her high calling of
+virtuous wife and mother. She washed her hands of Harmony and Peter. She
+tied on her veil with shaking hands, and prepared to leave Harmony to
+her fate.
+
+“Give me your mother's address,” she demanded.
+
+“Certainly not.”
+
+“You absolutely refuse to save yourself?”
+
+“From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to save
+myself from, Mrs. Boyer--uncharitable people, and--and cruel people.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
+
+“Meaning me!” she retorted. “My dear child, people are always cruel who
+try to save us from ourselves.”
+
+Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna's specious arguments must pop into
+her head at that instant and demand expression.
+
+“People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old standards
+have gone. It is what one's conscience condemns that is wrong, isn't
+it? Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit the average, not the
+exception.”
+
+Anna! Anna!
+
+Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
+
+“You are impossible!” she snapped. “After all, I believe it is Peter who
+needs protection! I shall speak to him.”
+
+She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.
+
+“And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone. But if
+you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon YOU, keep your
+views to yourself.”
+
+Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy's room and sank
+on her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the coverlet; she
+dared not touch it for fear of waking him--but she laid her cheek close
+to it for comfort. When Peter came in, much later, he found the boy wide
+awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.
+
+“I think she's been crying,” Jimmy whispered. “She's been sobbing in her
+sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club. It was
+typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
+there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings.
+Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy
+of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and
+fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt.
+He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a
+magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and
+really in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and
+Harmony were not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and
+the reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in
+which he and Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter
+to scowl over his books at them, a future in which life was one long
+piano-violin duo, with the candles in the chandelier going out one by
+one, leaving them at last alone in scented darkness together--McLean
+heard nothing until the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
+
+After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating
+taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment
+that Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation
+was a little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with
+a stifled oath.
+
+Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
+
+“It is exactly as I tell you,” she was saying. “If Peter Byrne is trying
+to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been
+there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the
+club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one
+thing remains, she is not there now.”
+
+McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found
+a “comfortable” at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage.
+McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him.
+The cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of
+protests from its frantic passenger.
+
+The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence that
+afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He
+had thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew
+it now in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that
+maddened him: the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress
+in Peter's voice when he spoke to the girl, Peter's steady eyes in the
+semi-gloom of the salon while Harmony played.
+
+At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed,
+bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for
+half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the
+girl first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining--
+
+He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a madman. Peter
+was already there; his footprints were fresh in the slush of the path.
+The house door was closed but not locked. McLean ran up the stairs. It
+was barely twilight outside, but the staircase well was dark. At the
+upper landing he was compelled to fumble for the bell.
+
+Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the salon came
+a glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and furious, faced Peter.
+
+“I want to see Harmony,” he said without preface.
+
+Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when the bell
+rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs. Boyer's visit. In
+the second between the peal of the bell and his opening the door he had
+decided what to do.
+
+“Come in.”
+
+McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much shorter as
+slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his eyes.
+
+“Where is she?”
+
+“In the kitchen, I think. Come into the salon.”
+
+McLean flung off his coat. Peter closed the door behind him and stood
+just inside. He had his pipe as usual. “I came to see her, not you,
+Byrne.”
+
+“So I gather. I'll let you see her, of course, but don't you want to see
+me first?”
+
+“I want to take her away from here.”
+
+“Why? Are you better able to care for her than I am?”
+
+McLean stood rigid. He had thrust his clenched hands into his pockets.
+
+“You're a scoundrel, Byrne,” he said steadily. “Why didn't you tell me
+this this afternoon?”
+
+“Because I knew if I did you'd do just what you are doing.”
+
+“Are you going to keep her here?”
+
+Peter changed color at the thrust, but he kept himself in hand.
+
+“I'm not keeping her here,” he said patiently. “I'm doing the best I can
+under the circumstances.”
+
+“Then your best is pretty bad.”
+
+“Perhaps. If you would try to remember the circumstances, McLean,--that
+the girl has no place else to go, practically no money, and that I--”
+
+“I remember one circumstance, that you are living here alone with her
+and that you're crazy in love with her.”
+
+“That has nothing to do with you. As long as I treat her--”
+
+“Bah!”
+
+“Will you be good enough to let me finish what I am trying to say? She's
+safe with me. When I say that I mean it. She will not go away from
+here with you or with any one else if I can prevent it. And if you care
+enough about her to try to keep her happy you'll not let her know you
+have been here. I've got a woman coming to take Anna's place. That ought
+to satisfy you.”
+
+“Dr. Jennings?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“She'll not come. Mrs. Boyer has been talking to her. Inside of an hour
+the whole club will have it--every American in Vienna will know about it
+in a day or so. I tell you, Byrne, you're doing an awful thing.”
+
+Peter drew a long breath. He had had his bad half-hour before McLean
+came; had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony trying to smile,
+see her dragging about, languid and white, see her tragic attempts
+to greet him on the old familiar footing. Through it all he had been
+sustained by the thought that a day or two days would see the old
+footing reestablished, another woman in the house, life again worth the
+living and Harmony smiling up frankly into his eyes. Now this hope had
+departed.
+
+“You can't keep me from seeing her, you know,” McLean persisted. “I've
+got to put this thing to her. She's got to choose.”
+
+“What alternative have you to suggest?”
+
+“I'd marry her if she'd have me.”
+
+After all Peter had expected that. And, if she cared for the boy
+wouldn't that be best for her? What had he to offer against that? He
+couldn't marry. He could only offer her shelter, against everything
+else. Even then he did not dislike McLean. He was a man, every slender
+inch of him, this boy musician. Peter's heart sank, but he put down his
+pipe and turned to the door.
+
+“I'll call her,” he said. “But, since this concerns me very vitally, I
+should like to be here while you put the thing to her. After that if you
+like--”
+
+He called Harmony. She had given Jimmy his supper and was carrying out a
+tray that seemed hardly touched.
+
+“He won't eat to-night,” she said miserably. “Peter, if he stops eating,
+what can we do? He is so weak!”
+
+Peter, took the tray from her gently.
+
+“Harry dear,” he said, “I want you to come into the salon. Some one
+wishes to speak to you.”
+
+“To me?”
+
+“Yes. Harry, do you remember that evening in the kitchen when--Do you
+recall what I promised?”
+
+“Yes, Peter.”
+
+“You are sure you know what I mean?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That's all right, then. McLean wants to see you.”
+
+She hesitated, looking up at him.
+
+“McLean? You look so grave, Peter. What is it?”
+
+“He will tell you. Nothing alarming.”
+
+Peter gave McLean a minute alone after all, while he carried the tray
+to the kitchen. He had no desire to play watchdog over the girl, he told
+himself savagely; only to keep himself straight with her and to save
+her from McLean's impetuosity. He even waited in the kitchen to fill and
+light his pipe.
+
+McLean had worked himself into a very fair passion. He was intense,
+almost theatrical, as he stood with folded arms waiting for Harmony. So
+entirely did the girl fill his existence that he forgot, or did not care
+to remember, how short a time he had known her. As Harmony she dominated
+his life and his thoughts; as Harmony he addressed her when, rather
+startled, she entered the salon and stood just inside the closed door.
+
+“Peter said you wanted to speak to me.”
+
+McLean groaned. “Peter!” he said. “It is always Peter. Look here,
+Harmony, you cannot stay here.”
+
+“It is only for a few hours. To-morrow some one is coming. And, anyhow,
+Peter is going to Semmering. We know it is unusual, but what can we do?”
+
+“Unusual! It's--it's damnable. It's the appearance of the thing, don't
+you see that?”
+
+“I think it is rather silly to talk of appearance when there is no one
+to care. And how can I leave? Jimmy needs me all the time--”
+
+“That's another idiocy of Peter's. What does he mean by putting you in
+this position?”
+
+“I am one of Peter's idiocies.”
+
+Peter entered on that. He took in the situation with a glance, and
+Harmony turned to him; but if she had expected Peter to support her, she
+was disappointed. Whatever decision she was to make must be her own,
+in Peter's troubled mind. He crossed the room and stood at one of the
+windows, looking out, a passive participant in the scene.
+
+The day had been a trying one for Harmony. What she chose to consider
+Peter's defection was a fresh stab. She glanced from McLean, flushed and
+excited, to Peter's impassive back. Then she sat down, rather limp, and
+threw out her hands helplessly.
+
+“What am I to do?” she demanded. “Every one comes with cruel things to
+say, but no one tells me what to do.”
+
+Peter turned away from the window.
+
+“You can leave here,” ventured McLean. “That's the first thing. After
+that--”
+
+“Yes, and after that, what?”
+
+McLean glanced at Peter. Then he took a step toward the girl.
+
+“You could marry me, Harmony,” he said unsteadily. “I hadn't expected
+to tell you so soon, or before a third person.” He faltered before
+Harmony's eyes, full of bewilderment. “I'd be very happy if you--if you
+could see it that way. I care a great deal, you see.”
+
+It seemed hours to Peter before she made any reply, and that her voice
+came from miles away.
+
+“Is it really as bad as that?” she asked. “Have I made such a mess of
+things that some one, either you or Peter, must marry me to straighten
+things out? I don't want to marry any one. Do I have to?”
+
+“Certainly you don't have to,” said Peter. There was relief in his
+voice, relief and also something of exultation. “McLean, you mean well,
+but marriage isn't the solution. We were getting along all right until
+our friends stepped in. Let Mrs. Boyer howl all over the colony; there
+will be one sensible woman somewhere to come and be comfortable here
+with us. In the interval we'll manage, unless Harmony is afraid. In that
+case--”
+
+“Afraid of what?”
+
+The two men exchanged glances, McLean helpless, Peter triumphant.
+
+“I do not care what Mrs. Boyer says, at least not much. And I am not
+afraid of anything else at all.”
+
+McLean picked up his overcoat.
+
+“At least,” he appealed to Peter, “you'll come over to my place?”
+
+“No!” said Peter.
+
+McLean made a final appeal to Harmony.
+
+“If this gets out,” he said, “you are going to regret it all your life.”
+
+“I shall have nothing to regret,” she retorted proudly.
+
+Had Peter not been there McLean would have made a better case, would
+have pleaded with her, would have made less of a situation that roused
+her resentment and more of his love for her. He was very hard hit, very
+young. He was almost hysterical with rage and helplessness; he wanted
+to slap her, to take her in his arms. He writhed under the restraint of
+Peter's steady eyes.
+
+He got to the door and turned, furious.
+
+“Then it's up to you,” he flung at Peter. “You're old enough to know
+better; she isn't. And don't look so damned superior. You're human, like
+the rest of us. And if any harm comes to her--”
+
+Here unexpectedly Peter held out his hand, and after a sheepish moment
+McLean took it.
+
+“Good-night, old man,” said Peter. “And--don't be an ass.”
+
+As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean knew
+what in his heart he had known all along--that the girl was safe enough;
+that all that was to fear was the gossip of scandal-lovers. He took
+Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony stood before her very erect.
+
+“I suppose I've said too much; I always do,” he said contritely. “But
+you know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?”
+
+“I am only sorry.”
+
+He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic moment for
+him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door and down the dark
+stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax, after all that, to have Peter
+discover he had gone without his hat and toss it down to him a flight
+below.
+
+All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between Harmony and
+Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked during the meal of
+careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and Peter's proposed trip to
+Semmering, avoided each other's eyes, ate little or nothing. Once when
+Harmony passed Peter his coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between
+them they dropped the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns,
+Peter wretched and silent.
+
+Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from
+Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days. In two
+days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some one else. In two
+days some of the restraint would have worn off. Things would never be
+the same, but they would be forty-eight hours better.
+
+Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading aloud to
+him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a valise for the
+next day's journey and counted out into an envelope half of the money he
+had with him. This he labeled “Household Expenses” and set it up on
+his table, leaning against his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony
+about. The salon was dark except for the study lamp turned down.
+
+Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers
+and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the landing; Peter
+carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles on Jimmy's stand
+and wrote full directions for every emergency he could imagine. Then,
+finding it still only nine o'clock, he turned up the lamp in the salon
+and wrote an exciting letter from Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb,
+wandering on the mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and
+carried down into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because
+he stood so in loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable that
+before long Jimmy would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and, of course,
+because it had been a trying day all through, Peter's lips were none too
+steady as he folded up the letter.
+
+The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and closed
+the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to feel his way
+through the room. It touched a little sweater coat of Harmony's, hanging
+over the back of a chair. Peter picked it up in a very passion of
+tenderness and held it to him.
+
+“Little girl!” he choked. “My little girl! God help me!”
+
+He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to find
+that the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could rouse such a
+storm in him. It made him pause. He put down the coat and pulled himself
+up sharply. McLean was right; he was only human stuff, very poor human
+stuff. He put the little coat down hastily, only to lift it again gently
+to his lips.
+
+“Good-night, dear,” he whispered. “Goodnight, Harmony.”
+
+Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and
+supper that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor
+pension. They came to make inquiries.
+
+The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of
+the bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still lacked an
+occupant.
+
+Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly
+medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of
+language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life
+are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual
+disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised
+eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of
+Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter
+was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.
+
+“The women were also wicked,” she said. “Of a man what does one expect?
+But of a woman! And the younger one looked--Herr Gott! She had the eyes
+of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of them
+left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The
+Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he
+so to me!”
+
+“She says,” interpreted Dr. Jennings, “that they were a bad lot--that
+the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!”
+
+Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on
+the other woman's arm.
+
+“What an escape for you!” she said. “If you had gone there to live and
+then found the establishment--queer!”
+
+From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.
+Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.
+
+“American ladies!” said Olga. “Two, old and fat.”
+
+“More hot water!” growled Katrina. “Why do not the Americans stay in
+their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the
+earth.”
+
+Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.
+
+“Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne
+and the others!”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Of a certainty.”
+
+“Then let me to the door!”
+
+“A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says--how she is
+wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she
+sent them all away. Here, take the door!”
+
+Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the
+dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having
+retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best
+forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a
+slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her
+head. “The Frau Schwarz is wrong,” cried Olga passionately in Vienna
+dialect. “They were good, all of them!”
+
+“What in the world--”
+
+“And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr
+Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her.”
+
+Dr. Jennings was puzzled.
+
+“She wishes to know where the girl lives,” she interpreted to Mrs.
+Boyer. “A man wishes to know.”
+
+“Naturally!” said Mrs. Boyer. “Well, don't tell her.”
+
+Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to
+be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev,
+Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were
+inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a
+gesture.
+
+“She says,” she interpreted as they walked on, “that Dr. Peter--by which
+I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a necktie, and that she'll be in
+hot water if she does not return it.”
+
+Mrs. Boyer sniffed.
+
+“In love with him, probably, like the others!” she said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very early and
+without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying diagonally across
+his small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets. The communicating door
+into Harmony's room was open. Peter kept his eyes carefully from it,
+but his ears were less under control. He could hear her soft breathing.
+There were days coming when Peter would stand where he stood then and
+listen, and find only silence.
+
+He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully behind
+him and lighting a match to find his way down the staircase. The Portier
+was not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and to stand by while he donned
+the trousers which he deemed necessary to the dignity of his position
+before he opened the street door.
+
+Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter. The dawn
+grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The hurrying crowds
+at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his coffee, taken from a bare
+table in the station. The horizontal morning sunlight, shining in
+through marvelously clean windows, warmed the marble of the floor, made
+black shadows beside the heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into
+gold the hair of a toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The
+same morning light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of
+one of his shoes. Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at
+the bits of dust that floated in the sunshine.
+
+Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a passing
+thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it lasted Peter was a
+king. Everything was well. The world was his oyster. Life was his,
+to make it what he would--youth and hope and joy. Under the beatific
+influence he expanded, grew, almost shone. Youth and hope and joy--that
+cometh in the morning.
+
+The ecstasy passed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer shone;
+he still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and hugged it. He
+hunted out a beggar he had passed and gave him five Hellers. He helped a
+suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered bundle; he called the guard
+on the train “son” and forced a grin out of that dignitary.
+
+Peter traveled third-class, which was quite comfortable, and no bother
+about “Nicht Rauchen” signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness persisted as
+far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing ruggedness of the scenery
+and his first view of the Raxalpe, came recollection of the urgency of
+Stewart's last message, of Marie Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy
+that awaited him at the end of his journey.
+
+Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected. Love
+was a blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in
+his corner and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he
+recalled the look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when
+she looked at Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little
+thing. If only she'd had a chance!--Why wasn't he rich enough to help
+the ones who needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no
+one the wiser, and make her way.
+
+“Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!” Peter reflected. “Poor
+little guttersnipe!”
+
+The weather was beautiful. The sleet of the previous day in Vienna had
+been a deep snowfall on the mountains. The Schwarza was frozen, the
+castle of Liechtenstein was gray against a white world. A little
+pilgrimage church far below seemed snowed in against the faithful. The
+third-class compartment filled with noisy skiing parties. The old woman
+opened her oilcloth bundle, and taking a cat out of a box inside fed it
+a sausage.
+
+Up and up, past the Weinzettelwand and the Station Breitenstein, across
+the highest viaduct, the Kalte Rinne, and so at last to Semmering.
+
+The glow had died at last for Peter. He did not like his errand, was
+very vague, indeed, as to just what that errand might be. He was stiff
+and rather cold. Also he thought the cat might stifle in the oilcloth,
+but the old woman too clearly distrusted him to make it possible
+to interfere. Anyhow, he did not know the German for either cat or
+oilcloth.
+
+He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This made
+him vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know Stewart well
+enough to know whether he was punctilious in such matters or not: as a
+matter of fact he hardly knew him at all. It was because he had appealed
+to him that Peter was there, it being only necessary to Peter to be
+needed, and he was anywhere.
+
+The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his valise
+and started up--first long flights of steps through the pines, then a
+steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he met groups coming
+down, men that he thought probably American, pretty women in “tams” and
+sweaters. He watched for Marie, but there was no sign of her.
+
+He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he turned
+in at the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people following it,
+coming toward him. It was a singularly silent party. Peter, with his
+hand on the door-knocker, watched its approach with some curiosity.
+
+It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round it.
+Even then Peter did not understand. He did not understand until he
+saw Stewart, limp and unconscious, lifted out of the straw and carried
+toward him.
+
+Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery.
+And Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
+possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for Stewart,
+of publicity that would mean an end to the situation. But every inch of
+her soul was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down,
+and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree
+tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps
+even not yet dead--that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time
+and suffer!
+
+Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
+threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter, it had
+been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But there was
+this difference, whereas before he had drawn her back from the window
+and clapped her into sanity, now he let her alone. At the end of one of
+their quarrels she had flung out on to the balcony, and then had watched
+him through the opening in the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!
+
+Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over the
+mountain roads, seldom alone with Anita, but always near her. He left
+Marie sulking or sewing, as the case might be. He returned in the
+evening to find her still sulking, still sewing.
+
+But Marie did not sulk all day, or sew. She too was out, never far from
+Stewart, always watching. Many times she escaped discovery only by a
+miracle, as when she stooped behind an oxcart, pretending to tie her
+shoe, or once when they all met face to face, and although she lowered
+her veil Stewart must have known her instantly had he not been so intent
+on helping Anita over a slippery gutter.
+
+She planned a dozen forms of revenge and found them impossible of
+execution. Stewart himself was frightfully unhappy. For the first
+time in his life he was really in love, with all the humility of the
+condition. There were days when he would not touch Anita's hand, when
+he hardly spoke, when the girl herself would have been outraged at
+his conduct had she not now and then caught him watching her, seen the
+wretchedness in his eyes.
+
+The form of Marie's revenge was unpremeditated, after all. The light
+mountain snow was augmented by a storm; roads were ploughed through
+early in the morning, leaving great banks on either side. Sleigh-bells
+were everywhere. Coasting parties made the steep roads a menace to
+the pedestrian; every up-climbing sleigh carried behind it a string of
+sleds, going back to the starting-point.
+
+Below the hotel was the Serpentine Coast, a long and dangerous course,
+full of high-banked curves, of sudden descents, of long straightaway
+dashes through the woodland. Two miles, perhaps three, it wound its
+tortuous way down the mountain. Up by the highroad to the crest again,
+only a mile or less. Thus it happened that the track was always clear,
+except for speeding sleds. No coasters, dragging sleds back up the
+slide, interfered.
+
+The track was crowded. Every minute a sled set out, sped down the
+straightaway, dipped, turned, disappeared. A dozen would be lined up,
+waiting for the interval and the signal. And here, watching from the
+porch of the church, in the very shadow of the saints, Marie found her
+revenge.
+
+Stewart had given her a little wrist watch. Stewart and Anita
+were twelfth in line. By the watch, then, twelve minutes down the
+mountain-side, straight down through the trees to a curve that Marie
+knew well, a bad curve, only to be taken by running well up on the
+snowbank. Beyond the snowbank there was a drop, fifteen feet, perhaps
+more, into the yard of a Russian villa. Stewart and Anita were twelfth;
+a man in a green stocking-cap was eleventh. The hillside was steep.
+Marie negotiated it by running from tree to tree, catching herself,
+steadying for a second, then down again. Once she fell and rolled a
+little distance. There was no time to think; perhaps had she thought she
+would have weakened. She had no real courage, only desperation.
+
+As she reached the track the man in the green stocking-cap was in
+sight. A minute and a half she had then, not more. She looked about her
+hastily. A stone might serve her purpose, almost anything that would
+throw the sled out of its course. She saw a tree branch just above the
+track and dragged at it frantically. Some one was shouting at her from
+an upper window of the Russian villa. She did not hear. Stewart and
+Anita had made the curve above and were coming down at frantic speed.
+Marie stood, her back to the oncoming rush of the sled, swaying
+slightly. When she could hear the singing of the runners she stooped and
+slid the tree branch out against the track.
+
+She had acted almost by instinct, but with devilish skill. The sled
+swung to one side up the snowbank, and launched itself into the air.
+Marie heard the thud and the silence that followed it. Then she turned
+and scuttled like a hunted thing up the mountain side.
+
+Peter put in a bad day. Marie was not about, could not be located.
+Stewart, suffering from concussion, lay insensible all day and all of
+the night. Peter could find no fracture, but felt it wise to get another
+opinion. In the afternoon he sent for a doctor from the Kurhaus and
+learned for the first time that Anita had also been hurt--a broken arm.
+“Not serious,” said the Kurhaus man. “She is brave, very brave, the
+young woman. I believe they are engaged?” Peter said he did not know and
+thought very hard. Where was Marie? Not gone surely. Here about him lay
+all her belongings, even her purse.
+
+Toward evening Stewart showed some improvement. He was not conscious,
+but he swallowed better and began to toss about. Peter, who had had a
+long day and very little sleep the night before, began to look jaded. He
+would have sent for a nurse from the Kurhaus, but he doubted Stewart's
+ability to stand any extra financial strain, and Peter could not help
+any.
+
+The time for supper passed, and no Marie.
+
+The landlady sent up a tray to Peter, stewed meat and potatoes, a
+salad, coffee. Peter sat in a corner with his back to Stewart and ate
+ravenously. He had had nothing since the morning's coffee. After that he
+sat down again by the bed to watch. There was little to do but watch.
+
+The meal had made him drowsy. He thought of his pipe. Perhaps if he got
+some fresh air and a smoke! He remembered the balcony.
+
+It was there on the balcony that he found Marie, a cowering thing that
+pushed his hands away when he would have caught her and broke into
+passionate crying.
+
+“I cannot! I cannot!”
+
+“Cannot what?” demanded Peter gently, watching her. So near was the
+balcony rail!
+
+“Throw myself over. I've tried, Peter. I cannot!”
+
+“I should think not!” said Peter sternly. “Just now when we need you,
+too! Come in and don't be a foolish child.”
+
+But Marie would not go in. She held back, clinging tight to Peter's big
+hand, moaning out in the dialect of the people that always confused him
+her story of the day, of what she had done, of watching Stewart brought
+back, of stealing into the house and through an adjacent room to the
+balcony, of her desperation and her cowardice.
+
+She was numb with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, quite childish,
+helpless. Peter stood out on the balcony with his arm round her, while
+the night wind beat about them, and pondered what was best to do. He
+thought she might come in and care for Stewart, at least, until he was
+conscious. He could get her some supper.
+
+“How can I?” she asked. “I was seen. They are searching for me now. Oh,
+Peter! Peter!”
+
+“Who is searching for you? Who saw you?”
+
+“The people in the Russian villa.”
+
+“Did they see your face?”
+
+“I wore a veil. I think not.”
+
+“Then come in and change your clothes. There is a train down at
+midnight. You can take it.”
+
+“I have no money.”
+
+This raised a delicate question. Marie absolutely refused to take
+Stewart's money. She had almost none of her own. And there were other
+complications--where was she to go? The family of the injured girl did
+not suspect her since they did not know of her existence. She might get
+away without trouble. But after that, what?
+
+Peter pondered this on the balcony, while Marie in the bedroom was
+changing her clothing, soaked with a day in the snow. He came to the
+inevitable decision, the decision he knew at the beginning that he was
+going to make.
+
+“If I could only put it up to Harmony first!” he reflected. “But she
+will understand when I tell her. She always understands.”
+
+Standing there on the little balcony, with tragedy the thickness of
+a pine board beyond him, Peter experienced a bit of the glow of the
+morning, as of one who stumbling along in a dark place puts a hand on a
+friend.
+
+He went into the room. Stewart was lying very still and breathing
+easily. On her knees beside the bed knelt Marie. At Peter's step she
+rose and faced him.
+
+“I am leaving him, Peter, for always.”
+
+“Good!” said Peter heartily. “Better for you and better for him.”
+
+Marie drew a long breath. “The night train,” she said listlessly, “is an
+express. I had forgotten. It is double fare.”
+
+“What of that, little sister?” said Peter. “What is a double fare when
+it means life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And there will be
+happiness, little sister.”
+
+He put his hand in his pocket.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The Portier was almost happy that morning. For one thing, he had won
+honorable mention at the Schubert Society the night before; for another,
+that night the Engel was to sing Mignon, and the Portier had spent his
+Christmas tips for a ticket. All day long he had been poring over the
+score.
+
+“'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen?'” he sang with feeling
+while he polished the floors. He polished them with his feet, wearing
+felt boots for the purpose, and executing in the doing a sort of
+ungainly dance--a sprinkle of wax, right foot forward and back, left
+foot forward and back, both feet forward and back in a sort of double
+shuffle; more wax, more vigorous polishing, more singing, with longer
+pauses for breath. “'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees
+bloom?'” he bellowed--sprinkle of wax, right foot, left foot, any foot
+at all. Now and then he took the score from his pocket and pored over
+it, humming the air, raising his eyebrows over the high notes, dropping
+his chin to the low ones. It was a wonderful morning. Between greetings
+to neighbors he sang--a bit of talk, a bit of song.
+
+“'Kennst du das Land'--Good-morning, sir--the old Rax wears a crown. It
+will snow soon. 'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen'--Ah, madam the milk
+Frau, and are the cows frozen up to-day like the pump? No? Marvelous!
+Dost thou know that to-night is Mignon at the Opera, and that the Engel
+sings? 'Kennst du das Land'--”
+
+At eleven came Rosa with her husband, the soldier from Salzburg with one
+lung. He was having a holiday from his sentry duty at the hospital,
+and the one lung seemed to be a libel, for while the women had coffee
+together and a bit of mackerel he sang a very fair bass to the Portier's
+tenor. Together they pored over the score, and even on their way to the
+beer hall hummed together such bits as they recalled.
+
+On one point they differed. The score was old and soiled with much
+thumbing. At one point, destroyed long since, the sentry sang A sharp:
+the Portier insisted on A natural. They argued together over three
+Steins of beer; the waiter, referred to, decided for A flat. It was a
+serious matter to have one's teeth set, as one may say, for a natural
+and then to be shocked with an unexpected half-tone up or down! It
+destroyed the illusion; it disappointed; it hurt.
+
+The sentry stuck to the sharp--it was sung so at the Salzburg opera.
+The Portier snapped his thumb at the Salzburg opera. Things were looking
+serious; they walked back to the locale in silence. The sentry coughed.
+Possibly there was something, after all, in the one-lung rumor.
+
+It was then that the Portier remembered Harmony. She would know; perhaps
+she had the score.
+
+Harmony was having a bad morning. She had slept little until dawn, and
+Peter's stealthy closing of the outer door had wakened her by its very
+caution. After that there had been no more sleep. She had sat up in bed
+with her chin in her hands and thought.
+
+In the pitiless dawn, with no Peter to restore her to cheerfulness,
+things looked black, indeed. To what had she fallen, that first one man
+and then another must propose marriage to her to save her. To save her
+from what? From what people thought, or--each from the other?
+
+Were men so evil that they never trusted each other? McLean had frankly
+distrusted Peter, had said so. Or could it be that there was something
+about her, something light and frivolous? She had been frivolous. She
+always laughed at Peter's foolishnesses. Perhaps that was it. That
+was it. They were afraid for her. She had thrown herself on Peter's
+hands--almost into his arms. She had made this situation.
+
+She must get away, of course. If only she had some one to care for Jimmy
+until Peter returned! But there was no one. The Portier's wife was fond
+of Jimmy, but not skillful. And suppose he were to wake in the night and
+call for her and she would not come. She cried a little over this. After
+a time she pattered across the room in her bare feet and got from a
+bureau drawer the money she had left. There was not half enough to take
+her home. She could write; the little mother might get some for her, but
+at infinite cost, infinite humiliation. That would have to be a final,
+desperate resort.
+
+She felt a little more cheerful when she had had a cup of coffee. Jimmy
+wakened about that time, and she went through the details of his morning
+toilet with all the brightness she could assume--bath blankets, warm
+bath, toenails, finger-nails, fresh nightgown, fresh sheets, and--final
+touch of all--a real barber's part straight from crown to brow. After
+that ten minutes under extra comforters while the room aired.
+
+She hung over the boy that morning in an agony of tenderness--he was so
+little, so frail, and she must leave him. Only one thing sustained her.
+The boy loved her, but it was Peter he idolized. When he had Peter he
+needed nothing else. In some curious process of his childish mind Peter
+and Daddy mingled in inextricable confusion. More than once he had
+recalled events in the roving life he and his father had led.
+
+“You remember that, don't you?” he would say.
+
+“Certainly I remember,” Peter would reply heartily.
+
+“That evening on the steamer when I ate so many raisins.”
+
+“Of course. And were ill.”
+
+“Not ill--not that time. But you said I'd make a good pudding! You
+remember that, don't you?”
+
+And Peter would recall it all.
+
+Peter would be left. That was the girl's comfort.
+
+She made a beginning at gathering her things together that morning,
+while the boy dozed and the white mice scurried about the little cage.
+She could not take her trunk, or Peter would trace it. She would have
+to carry her belongings, a few at a time, to wherever she found a room.
+Then when Peter came back she could slip away and he would never find
+her.
+
+At noon came the Portier and the sentry, now no longer friends, and rang
+the doorbell. Harmony was rather startled. McLean and Mrs. Boyer had
+been her only callers, and she did not wish to see either of them. But
+after a second ring she gathered her courage in her hands and opened the
+door.
+
+She turned pale when she saw the sentry in his belted blue-gray tunic
+and high cap. She thought, of course, that Jimmy had been traced and
+that now he would be taken away. If the sentry knew her, however, he
+kept his face impassive and merely touched his cap. The Portier stated
+their errand. Harmony's face cleared. She even smiled as the Portier
+extended to her the thumbed score with its missing corner. What,
+after all, does it matter which was right--whether it was A sharp or A
+natural? What really matters is that Harmony, having settled the dispute
+and clinched the decision by running over the score for a page or two,
+turned to find the Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on
+paunch, enjoying a delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in
+sight.
+
+He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where,
+taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders
+back, arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with
+amazing rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the
+little boy in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth,
+and eyes seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with
+one another. When all was over--perhaps when his repertoire was
+exhausted--the sentry returned his nose to the center of his face,
+replaced eyes and mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton
+handkerchief. Then, still in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving
+the youngster enraptured, staring at the doorway.
+
+Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the
+higher part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were many
+unpretentious buildings. She had hunted board there and she knew. It
+was far from the Stadt, far from the fashionable part of town, a
+neighborhood of small shops, of frank indigence. There surely she could
+find a room, and perhaps in one of the small stores what she failed to
+secure in the larger, a position.
+
+Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's wife
+to sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking about for
+a room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small and wretchedly
+furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap dressmaker. The approach
+was forbidding enough. One entered a cavelike, cobble-paved court
+under the building, filled with wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and
+swearing teamsters. From the side a stone staircase took off and led,
+twisting from one landing cave to another, to the upper floor.
+
+Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of
+sewing-machines, the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a
+home but a hiding-place, took the room at once. She was asked for no
+reference. In a sort of agony lest this haven fail her she paid for a
+week in advance. The wooden bed, the cracked mirror over the table, even
+the pigeons outside on the windowsill were hers for a week.
+
+The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.
+
+“I will have it cleaned,” she explained. “I have been so busy: the
+masquerade season is on. The Fraulein is American, is she not?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“One knows the Americans. They are chic, not like the English. I have
+some American customers.”
+
+Harmony started. The dressmaker was shrewd. Many people hid in the
+sixteenth district. She hastened to reassure the girl.
+
+“They will not disturb you. And just now I have but one, a dancer. I
+shall have the room cleaned. Good-bye, Fraulein.”
+
+So far, good. She had a refuge now, one spot that the venom of scandal
+could not poison, where she could study and work--work hard, although
+there could be no more lessons--one spot where Peter would not have to
+protect her, where Peter, indeed, would never find her. This thought,
+which should have brought comfort, brought only new misery. Peace seemed
+dearly bought all at once; shabby, wholesome, hearty Peter, with his
+rough hair and quiet voice, his bulging pockets and steady eyes--she was
+leaving Peter forever, exchanging his companionship for that of a row
+of pigeons on a window-sill. He would find some one, of course; but who
+would know that he liked toast made hard and plenty of butter, or to
+leave his bed-clothing loose at the foot, Peter being very long and apt
+to lop over? The lopping over brought a tear or two. A very teary and
+tragic young heroine, this Harmony, prone to go about for the last day
+or two with a damp little handkerchief tucked in her sleeve.
+
+She felt her way down the staircase and into the cave below. Fate hangs
+by a very slender thread sometimes. If a wagon had not lumbered by as
+she reached the lowest step, so that she must wait and thus had time
+to lower her veil, she would have been recognized at once by the little
+Georgiev, waiting to ascend. But the wagon was there, Harmony lowered
+her veil, the little Georgiev, passing a veiled young woman in the
+gloom, went up the staircase with even pulses and calm and judicial
+bearing, up to the tiny room a floor or two below Harmony's, where he
+wrote reports to the Minister of War and mixed them with sonnets--to
+Harmony.
+
+Harmony went back to the Siebensternstrasse, having accomplished what
+she had set out to do and being very wretched in consequence. Because
+she was leaving the boy so soon she strove to atone for her coming
+defection by making it a gala evening. The child was very happy. She
+tucked him up in the salon, lighted all the candles, served him the
+daintiest of suppers there. She brought in the mice and tied tiny bows
+on their necks; she played checkers with him while the supper dishes
+waited, and went down to defeat in three hilarious games; and last of
+all she played to him, joyous music at first, then slower, drowsier
+airs, until his heavy head dropped on his shoulder and she gathered him
+up in tender arms and carried him to bed.
+
+It was dawn when Marie arrived. Harmony was sleeping soundly when the
+bell rang. Her first thought was that Peter had come back--but Peter
+carried a key. The bell rang again, and she slipped on the old kimono
+and went to the door.
+
+“Is it Peter?” she called, hand on knob.
+
+“I come from Peter. I have a letter,” in German.
+
+“Who is it?”
+
+“You do not know me--Marie Jedlicka. Please let me come in.”
+
+Bewildered, Harmony opened the door, and like a gray ghost Marie slipped
+by her and into the hall.
+
+There was a gaslight burning very low; Harmony turned it up and faced
+her visitor. She recognized her at once--the girl Dr. Stewart had been
+with in the coffee-house.
+
+“Something has happened to Peter!”
+
+“No. He is well. He sent this to the Fraulein Wells.”
+
+“I am the Fraulein Wells.”
+
+Marie held out the letter and staggered. Harmony put her in a chair; she
+was bewildered, almost frightened. Crisis of some sort was written on
+Marie's face. Harmony felt very young, very incapable. The other girl
+refused coffee, would not even go into the salon until Peter's letter
+had been read. She was a fugitive, a criminal; the Austrian law is
+severe to those that harbor criminals. Let Harmony read:--
+
+“DEAR HARRY,--Will you forgive me for this and spread the wings of your
+splendid charity over this poor child? Perhaps I am doing wrong in
+sending her to you, but just now it is all I can think of. If she wants
+to talk let her talk. It will probably help her. Also feed her, will
+you? And if she cannot sleep, give her one of the blue powders I fixed
+for Jimmy. I'll be back later to-day if I can make it.
+
+“PETER”
+
+Harmony glanced up from the letter. Marie sat drooping in her chair. Her
+eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her at once, but any
+surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in Peter's apartment was
+sunk in a general apathy, a compound of nervous reaction and fatigue.
+During the long hours in the express she had worn herself out with
+fright and remorse: there was nothing left now but exhaustion.
+
+Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold kitchen
+and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she could in the
+salon, and then went into her room to dress. There she read the letter
+again, and wondered if Peter had gone through life like this, picking up
+waifs and strays and shouldering their burdens for them. Decidedly, life
+with Peter was full of surprises.
+
+She remembered, as she hurried into her clothes; the boys' club back
+in America and the spelling-matches. Decidedly, also, Peter was an
+occupation, a state of mind, a career. No musician, hoping for a career
+of her own, could possibly marry Peter.
+
+That was a curious morning in the old lodge of Maria Theresa, while
+Stewart in the Pension Waldheim struggled back to consciousness, while
+Peter sat beside him and figured on an old envelope the problem of
+dividing among four enough money to support one, while McLean ate his
+heart out in wretchedness in his hotel.
+
+Marie told her story over the early breakfast, sitting with her thin
+elbows on the table, her pointed chin in her palms.
+
+“And now I am sorry,” she finished. “It has done no good. If it had only
+killed her but she was not much hurt. I saw her rise and bend over him.”
+
+Harmony was silent. She had no stock of aphorisms for the situation, no
+worldly knowledge, only pity.
+
+“Did Peter say he would recover?”
+
+“Yes. They will both recover and go to America. And he will marry her.”
+
+Perhaps Harmony would have been less comfortable, Marie less frank, had
+Marie realized that this establishment of Peter's was not on the same
+basis as Stewart's had been, or had Harmony divined her thought.
+
+The presence of the boy was discovered by his waking. Marie was taken
+in and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a
+marvelous people--to have taken into their house and their hearts this
+strange child--if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little slum mind
+was not certain.
+
+In the safety and comfort of the little apartment the Viennese expanded,
+cheered. She devoted herself to the boy, telling him strange folk tales,
+singing snatches of songs for him. The youngster took a liking to her at
+once. It seemed to Harmony, going about her morning routine, that Marie
+was her solution and Peter's.
+
+During the afternoon she took a package to the branch post-office and
+mailed it by parcel-post to the Wollbadgasse. On the way she met Mrs.
+Boyer face to face. That lady looked severely ahead, and Harmony passed
+her with her chin well up and the eyes of a wounded animal.
+
+McLean sent a great box of flowers that day. She put them, for lack of a
+vase, in a pitcher beside Jimmy's bed.
+
+At dusk a telegram came to say that Stewart was better and that Peter
+was on his way down to Vienna. He would arrive at eight. Time was
+very short now--seconds flashed by, minutes galloped. Harmony stewed
+a chicken for supper, and creamed the breast for Jimmy. She fixed the
+table, flowers in the center, the best cloth, Peter's favorite cheese.
+Six o'clock, six-thirty, seven; Marie was telling Jimmy a fairy tale and
+making the fairies out of rosebuds. The studylamp was lighted, the stove
+glowing, Peter's slippers were out, his old smoking-coat, his pipe.
+
+A quarter past seven. Peter would be near Vienna now and hungry. If he
+could only eat his supper before he learned--but that was impossible.
+He would come in, as he always did, and slam the outer door, and open it
+again to close it gently, as he always did, and then he would look for
+her, going from room to room until he found her--only to-night he would
+not find her.
+
+She did not say good-bye to Jimmy. She stood in the doorway and said a
+little prayer for him. Marie had made the flower fairies on needles, and
+they stood about his head on the pillow--pink and yellow and white elves
+with fluffy skirts. Then, very silently, she put on her hat and jacket
+and closed the outer door behind her. In the courtyard she turned and
+looked up. The great chandelier in the salon was not lighted, but from
+the casement windows shone out the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Peter had had many things to think over during the ride down the
+mountains. He had the third-class compartment to himself, and sat in a
+corner, soft hat over his eyes. Life had never been particularly simple
+to Peter--his own life, yes; a matter of three meals a day--he had had
+fewer--a roof, clothing. But other lives had always touched him closely,
+and at the contact points Peter glowed, fused, amalgamated. Thus he had
+been many people--good, indifferent, bad, but all needy. Thus, also,
+Peter had committed vicarious crimes, suffered vicarious illnesses,
+starved, died, loved--vicariously.
+
+And now, after years of living for others, Peter was living at last for
+himself--and suffering.
+
+Not that he understood exactly what ailed him. He thought he was tired,
+which was true enough, having had little sleep for two or three
+nights. Also he explained to himself that he was smoking too much, and
+resolutely--lighted another cigarette.
+
+Two things had revealed Peter's condition to himself: McLean had said:
+“You are crazy in love with her.” McLean's statement, lacking subtlety,
+had had a certain quality of directness. Even then Peter, utterly
+miserable, had refused to capitulate, when to capitulate would have
+meant the surrender of the house in the Siebensternstrasse. And the
+absence from Harmony had shown him just where he stood.
+
+He was in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with
+it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly
+it was, this love. Even if Harmony cared--and at the mere thought his
+heart pounded--what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her to
+accept the half of--nothing, to give up a career to share his struggle
+for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty under a
+bushel that he might wave aloft his feeble light!
+
+And there was no way out, no royal road to fortune by the route he had
+chosen; nothing but grinding work, with a result problematical and years
+ahead. There were even no legacies to expect, he thought whimsically.
+Peter had known a chap once, struggling along in gynecology, who had
+had a fortune left him by a G. P., which being interpreted is Grateful
+Patient. Peter's patients had a way of living, and when they did drop
+out, as happened now and then, had also a way of leaving Peter an unpaid
+bill in token of appreciation; Peter had even occasionally helped to
+bury them, by way, he defended himself, of covering up his mistakes.
+
+Peter, sitting back in his corner, allowed the wonderful scenery to slip
+by unnoticed. He put Harmony the Desirable out of his mind, and took
+to calculating on a scrap of paper what could be done for Harmony the
+Musician. He could hold out for three months, he calculated, and still
+have enough to send Harmony home and to get home himself on a slow boat.
+The Canadian lines were cheap. If Jimmy lived perhaps he could take him
+along: if not--
+
+He would have to put six months' work in the next three. That was not so
+hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived on it. Also
+there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in the salon propped in
+a chair and Harmony playing, the room dark save for the glow from the
+stove and for the one candle at Harmony's elbow.
+
+All roads lead to Rome. Peter's thoughts, having traveled in a circle,
+were back again to Harmony the Desirable--Harmony playing in the
+firelight, Harmony Hushed over the brick stove, Harmony paring potatoes
+that night in the kitchen when he--Harmony! Harmony!
+
+Stewart knew all about the accident and its cause. Peter had surmised as
+much when the injured man failed to ask for Marie.
+
+He tested him finally by bringing Marie's name into the conversation.
+Stewart ignored it, accepted her absence, refused to be drawn.
+
+That was at first. During the day, however, as he gained strength, he
+grew restless and uneasy. As the time approached for Peter to leave, he
+was clearly struggling with himself. The landlady had agreed to care
+for him and was bustling about the room. During one of her absences he
+turned to Peter.
+
+“I suppose Marie hasn't been round?”
+
+“She came back last night.”
+
+“Did she tell you?”
+
+“Yes, poor child.”
+
+“She's a devil!” Stewart said, and lay silent. Then: “I saw her shoot
+that thing out in front of us, but there was no time--Where is she now?”
+
+“Marie? I sent her to Vienna.”
+
+Stewart fell back, relieved, not even curious.
+
+“Thank Heaven for that!” he said. “I don't want to see her again. I'd do
+something I'd be sorry for. The kindest thing to say for her is that she
+was not sane.”
+
+“No,” said Peter gravely, “she was hardly sane.”
+
+Stewart caught his steady gaze and glanced away. For him Marie's little
+tragedy had been written and erased. He would forget it magnanimously.
+He had divided what he had with her, and she had repaid him by
+attempting his life. And not only his life, but Anita's. Peter followed
+his line of reasoning easily.
+
+“It's quite a frequent complication, Stewart,” he said, “but every man
+to whom it happens regards himself more or less as a victim. She fell in
+love with you, that's all. Her conduct is contrary to the ethics of the
+game, but she's been playing poor cards all along.”
+
+“Where is she?”
+
+“That doesn't matter, does it?”
+
+Stewart had lain back and closed his eyes. No, it didn't matter. A sense
+of great relief overwhelmed him. Marie was gone, frightened into hiding.
+It was as if a band that had been about him was suddenly loosed: he
+breathed deep, he threw out his arms and laughed from sheer reaction.
+Then, catching Peter's not particularly approving eyes, he colored.
+
+“Good Lord, Peter!” he said, “you don't know what I've gone through with
+that little devil. And now she's gone!” He glanced round the disordered
+room, where bandages and medicines crowded toilet articles on the
+dressing-table, where one of Marie's small slippers still lay where it
+had fallen under the foot of the bed, where her rosary still hung over
+the corner of the table. “Ring for the maid, Peter, will you! I've got
+to get this junk out of here. Some of Anita's people may come.”
+
+During that afternoon ride, while the train clump-clumped down the
+mountains, Peter thought of all this. Some of Marie's “junk” was in his
+bag; her rosary lay in his breastpocket, along with the pin he had sent
+her at Christmas. Peter happened on it, still in its box, which looked
+as if it had been cried over. He had brought it with him. He admired it
+very much, and it had cost money he could ill afford to spend.
+
+It was late when the train drew into the station. Peter, encumbered with
+Marie's luggage and his own, lowered his window and added his voice
+to the chorus of plaintive calls: “Portier! Portier!” they shouted.
+“Portier!” bawled Peter.
+
+He was obliged to resort to the extravagance of a taxicab. Possibly
+a fiacre would have done as well, but it cost almost as much and was
+slower. Moments counted now: a second was an hour, an hour a decade. For
+he was on his way to Harmony. Extravagance became recklessness. As soon
+die for a sheep as a lamb! He stopped the taxicab and bought a bunch of
+violets, stopped again and bought lilies of the valley to combine with
+the violets, went out of his way to the American grocery and bought a
+jar of preserved fruit.
+
+By that time he was laden. The jar of preserves hung in one shabby
+pocket, Marie's rosary dangled from another; the violets were buttoned
+under his overcoat against the cold.
+
+At the very last he held the taxi an extra moment and darted into the
+delicatessen shop across the Siebensternstrasse. From there, standing
+inside the doorway, he could see the lights in the salon across the way,
+the glow of his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. Peter whistled,
+stamped his cold feet, quite neglected--in spite of repeated warnings
+from Harmony--to watch the Herr Schenkenkaufer weigh the cheese,
+accepted without a glance a ten-Kronen piece with a hole in it.
+
+“And how is the child to-day?” asked the Herr Schenkenkaufer, covering
+the defective gold piece with conversation.
+
+“I do not know; I have been away,” said Peter. He almost sang it.
+
+“All is well or I would have heard. Wilhelm the Portier was but just now
+here.”
+
+“All well, of course,” sang Peter, eyes on the comfortable Floor of
+his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. “Auf wiedersehen, Herr
+Schenkenkaufer.”
+
+“Auf wiedersehen, Herr Doktor.”
+
+Violets, lilies-of-the-valley, cheese, rosary, luggage--thus Peter
+climbed the stairs. The Portier wished to assist him, but Peter
+declined. The Portier was noisy. There was to be a moment when Peter,
+having admitted himself with extreme caution, would present himself
+without so much as a creak to betray him, would stand in a doorway until
+some one, Harmony perhaps--ah, Peter!--would turn and see him. She had a
+way of putting one slender hand over her heart when she was startled.
+
+Peter put down the jar of preserved peaches outside. It was to be a
+second surprise. Also he put down the flowers; they were to be brought
+in last of all. One surprise after another is a cumulative happiness.
+Peter did not wish to swallow all his cake in one bite.
+
+For once he did not slam the outer door, although he very nearly did,
+and only caught it at the cost of a bruised finger. Inside he listened.
+There was no clatter of dishes, no scurrying back and forth from table
+to stove in the final excitement of dishing up. There was, however,
+a highly agreeable odor of stewing chicken, a crisp smell of baking
+biscuit.
+
+In the darkened hall Peter had to pause to steady himself. For he had
+a sudden mad impulse to shout Harmony's name, to hold out his arms, to
+call her to him there in the warm darkness, and when she had come, to
+catch her to him, to tell his love in one long embrace, his arms about
+her, his rough cheek against her soft one. No wonder he grew somewhat
+dizzy and had to pull himself together.
+
+The silence rather surprised him, until he recalled that Harmony was
+probably sewing in the salon, as she did sometimes when dinner was ready
+to serve. The boy was asleep, no doubt. He stole along on tiptoe, hardly
+breathing, to the first doorway, which was Jimmy's.
+
+Jimmy was asleep. Round him were the pink and yellow and white flower
+fairies with violet heads. Peter saw them and smiled. Then, his eyes
+growing accustomed to the light, he saw Marie, face down on the floor,
+her head on her arms. Still as she was, Peter knew she was not sleeping,
+only fighting her battle over again and losing.
+
+Some of the joyousness of his return fled from Peter, never to come
+back. The two silent figures were too close to tragedy. Peter, with a
+long breath, stole past the door and on to the salon. No Harmony there,
+but the great room was warm and cheery. The table was drawn near the
+stove and laid for Abendessen. The white porcelain coffee-pot had
+boiled and extinguished itself, according to its method, and now gently
+steamed.
+
+On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted
+but burning low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little
+money--almost all he had left Harmony when he went away.
+
+Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
+discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the rooms
+revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at last the fact
+stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter refused to accept it. He
+sat for a half-hour or even more by the fire in the salon, obstinately
+refusing to believe she was gone, keeping the supper warm against her
+return. He did not think or reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing,
+hardly moving, save when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he
+was all alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
+outer door.
+
+The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by alarm.
+During all the time that followed, that condition persisted, fright,
+almost terror. Harmony alone in the city, helpless, dependent,
+poverty-stricken. Harmony seeking employment under conditions Peter knew
+too well. But with his alarm came rage.
+
+Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
+gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the
+frightened Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation after
+accusation against some unnamed woman to whom he applied epithets that
+Marie's English luckily did not comprehend. Not a particularly heroic
+figure was Peter that night: a frantic, disheveled individual, before
+whom the Portier cowered, who struggled back to sanity through a berserk
+haze and was liable to swift relapses into fury again.
+
+To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be Peter's
+for many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim determination to keep
+on searching.
+
+There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the cabstands in
+the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The delicatessen seller
+had seen her go out that afternoon with a bundle and return without it.
+She had been gone only an hour or so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that
+she might have found a haven in the neighborhood--until he recalled the
+parcel-post.
+
+One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief, but she
+had also offered the girl a home. She might be at the Boyers'. Peter,
+flinging on a hat and without his overcoat, went to the Boyers'. Time
+was valuable, and he had wasted an hour, two hours, in useless rage. So
+he took a taxicab, and being by this time utterly reckless of cost let
+it stand while he interviewed the Boyers.
+
+Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring. Peter
+was past explanation or ceremonial.
+
+“Is Harmony here?” he demanded.
+
+“Harmony?”
+
+“Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing.”
+
+“Come in,” said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. “I don't
+know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer.”
+
+During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the bedroom, and
+for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter suffered the tortures
+of the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had meant to say by way of protest at
+the intrusion on the sacred privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died
+in her throat. Her plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps
+with guilt. Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet
+story; Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her
+unstayed figure, listened.
+
+“I thought,” finished Peter, “that since you had offered her a
+refuge--from me--she might have come here.”
+
+“I offered her a refuge--before I had been to the Pension Schwarz.”
+
+“Ah!” said Peter slowly. “And what about the Pension Schwarz?”
+
+“Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am obliged
+to say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the girl come here I
+could hardly--Frank, I will speak!--I could hardly have taken her in.”
+
+Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling out
+into the hall again. There he thought of something to say in reply,
+repudiation, thought better of it, started down the stairs.
+
+Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he put his
+hand on Peter's shoulder. “You know, old man, I don't believe that.
+These women--”
+
+“I know,” said Peter simply. “Thank you. Good-night.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean, from
+Mrs. Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing herself,
+to cutting the threads that bound her to the life in the
+Siebensternstrasse. She had drawn all her money, as Peter discovered
+later. The discovery caused him even more acute anxiety. The city was
+full of thieves; poverty and its companion, crime, lurked on every
+shadowy staircase of the barracklike houses, or peered, red-eyed, from
+every alleyway.
+
+And into this city of contrasts--of gray women of the night hugging
+gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with loathsome gestures, of
+smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths under great mustaches, of dapper
+soldiers to whom the young girl unattended was potential prey, into
+this night city of terror, this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine
+rubbing elbows with frost-nipped flesh, destitution sauntering along
+the fashionable Prater for lack of shelter, gilt wheels of royalty and
+yellow wheels of courtesans--Harmony had ventured alone for the second
+time.
+
+And this time there was no Peter Byrne to accost her cheerily in the
+twilight and win her by sheer friendliness. She was alone. Her funds
+were lower, much lower. And something else had gone--her faith. Mrs.
+Boyer had seen to that. In the autumn Harmony had faced the city
+clear-eyed and unafraid; now she feared it, met it with averted eyes,
+alas! understood it.
+
+It was not the Harmony who had bade a brave farewell to Scatchy and the
+Big Soprano in the station who fled to her refuge on the upper floor of
+the house in the Wollbadgasse. This was a hunted creature, alternately
+flushed and pale, who locked her door behind her before she took off
+her hat, and who, having taken off her hat and surveyed her hiding-place
+with tragic eyes, fell suddenly to trembling, alone there in the
+gaslight.
+
+She had had no plans beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to think
+the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing to eat,
+and the single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no German. The
+dressmaker had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not know where to find
+a restaurant, was afraid to trust herself to the streets alone. She went
+to bed supperless, with a tiny picture of Peter and Jimmy and the wooden
+sentry under her cheek.
+
+The pigeons, cooing on the window-sill, wakened her early. She was
+confused at first, got up to see if Jimmy had thrown off his blankets,
+and wakened to full consciousness with the sickening realization that
+Jimmy was not there.
+
+The dressmaker, whose name was Monia Reiff, slept late after her evening
+out. Harmony, collapsing with hunger and faintness, waited as long as
+she could. Then she put on her things desperately and ventured out.
+Surely at this hour Peter would not be searching, and even if he were he
+would never think of the sixteenth district. He would make inquiries, of
+course--the Pension Schwarz, Boyers', the master's.
+
+The breakfast brought back her strength and the morning air gave her
+confidence. The district, too, was less formidable than the neighborhood
+of the Karntnerstrasse and the Graben. The shops were smaller. The
+windows exhibited cheaper goods. There was a sort of family atmosphere
+about many of them; the head of the establishment in the doorway, the
+wife at the cashier's desk, daughters, cousins, nieces behind the
+wooden counters. The shopkeepers were approachable, instead of familiar.
+Harmony met no rebuffs, was respectfully greeted and cheerfully listened
+to. In many cases the application ended in a general consultation,
+shopkeeper, wife, daughters, nieces, slim clerks with tiny mustaches.
+She got addresses, followed them up, more consultations, more addresses,
+but no work. The reason dawned on her after a day of tramping, during
+which she kept carefully away from that part of the city where Peter
+might be searching for her.
+
+The fact was, of course, that her knowledge of English was her sole
+asset as a clerk. And there were few English and no tourists in the
+sixteenth district. She was marketing a commodity for which there was no
+demand.
+
+She lunched at a Konditorei, more to rest her tired body than because
+she needed food. The afternoon was as the morning. At six o'clock,
+long after the midwinter darkness had fallen, she stumbled back to the
+Wollbadgasse and up the whitewashed staircase.
+
+She had a shock at the second landing. A man had stepped into the angle
+to let her pass. A gasjet dared over his head, and she recognized the
+short heavy figure and ardent eyes of Georgiev. She had her veil down
+luckily, and he gave no sign of recognition. She passed on, and she
+heard him a second later descending. But there had been something
+reminiscent after all in her figure and carriage. The little Georgiev
+paused, halfway down, and thought a moment. It was impossible, of
+course. All women reminded him of the American. Had he not, only the
+day before, followed for two city blocks a woman old enough to be
+his mother, merely because she carried a violin case? But there was
+something about the girl he had just passed--Bah!
+
+A bad week for Harmony followed, a week of weary days and restless
+nights when she slept only to dream of Peter--of his hurt and
+incredulous eyes when he found she had gone; of Jimmy--that he needed
+her, was worse, was dying. More than once she heard him sobbing and
+wakened to the cooing of the pigeons on the window-sill. She grew thin
+and sunken-eyed; took to dividing her small hoard, half of it with her,
+half under the carpet, so that in case of accident all would not be
+gone.
+
+This, as it happened, was serious. One day, the sixth, she came back wet
+to the skin from an all-day rain, to find that the carpet bank had been
+looted. There was no clue. The stolid Hungarian, startled out of her
+lethargy, protested innocence; the little dressmaker, who seemed honest
+and friendly, wept in sheer sympathy. The fact remained--half the small
+hoard was gone.
+
+Two days more, a Sunday and a Monday. On Sunday Harmony played, and
+Georgiev in the room below, translating into cipher a recent conference
+between the Austrian Minister of War and the German Ambassador, put
+aside his work and listened. She played, as once before she had played
+when life seemed sad and tragic, the “Humoresque.” Georgiev, hands
+behind his head and eyes upturned, was back in the Pension Schwarz that
+night months ago when Harmony played the “Humoresque” and Peter stooped
+outside her door. The little Bulgarian sighed and dreamed.
+
+Harmony, a little sadder, a little more forlorn each day, pursued her
+hopeless quest. She ventured into the heart of the Stadt and paid a
+part of her remaining money to an employment bureau, to teach English
+or violin, whichever offered, or even both. After she had paid they told
+her it would be difficult, almost impossible without references. She had
+another narrow escape as she was leaving. She almost collided with Olga,
+the chambermaid, who, having clashed for the last time with Katrina, was
+seeking new employment. On another occasion she saw Marie in the crowd
+and was obsessed with a longing to call to her, to ask for Peter, for
+Jimmy. That meeting took the heart out of the girl. Marie was white and
+weary--perhaps the boy was worse. Perhaps Peter--Her heart contracted.
+But that was absurd, of course, Peter was always well and strong.
+
+Two things occurred that week, one unexpected, the other inevitable.
+The unexpected occurrence was that Monia Reiff, finding Harmony being
+pressed for work, offered the girl a situation. The wage was small, but
+she could live on it.
+
+The inevitable was that she met Georgiev on the stairs without her veil.
+
+It was the first day in the workroom. The apprentices were carrying home
+boxes for a ball that night. Thread was needed, and quickly. Harmony,
+who did odds and ends of sewing, was most easily spared. She slipped on
+her jacket and hat and ran down to the shop near by.
+
+It was on the return that she met Georgiev coming down. The afternoon
+was dark and the staircase unlighted. In the gloom one face was as
+another. Georgiev, listening intently, hearing footsteps, drew back
+into the embrasure of a window and waited. His swarthy face was tense,
+expectant. As the steps drew near, were light feminine instead of
+stealthy, the little spy relaxed somewhat. But still he waited,
+crouched.
+
+It was a second before he recognized Harmony, another instant before he
+realized his good fortune. She had almost passed. He put out an unsteady
+hand.
+
+“Fraulein!”
+
+“Herr Georgiev!”
+
+The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes gleamed.
+He struggled against the barrier of language, broke out in passionate
+Bulgar, switched to German punctuated with an English word here and
+there. Made intelligible, it was that he had found her at last. Harmony
+held her spools of thread and waited for the storm of languages to
+subside. Then:--
+
+“But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev.”
+
+“No?”
+
+Harmony colored.
+
+“I am--am hiding,” she explained. “Something very uncomfortable happened
+and I came here. Please don't say you have seen me.”
+
+Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly, with his
+ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed of course. His
+incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had actually been in the
+same building with him while he sought her everywhere else.
+
+“Then,” he said at last, “it was you who played Sunday.”
+
+“I surely.”
+
+She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.
+
+“Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?”
+
+“We shall meet again, of course.”
+
+“Fraulein,--with all respect,--sometime perhaps you will walk out with
+me?”
+
+“I am very busy all day.”
+
+“At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect, Fraulein!”
+
+Harmony was touched.
+
+“Sometime,” she consented. And then impulsively: “I am very lonely, Herr
+Georgiev.”
+
+She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and kissed
+it reverently. The Herr Georgiev's father was a nobleman in his own
+country, and all the little spy's training had been to make of a girl
+in Harmony's situation lawful prey. But in the spy's glowing heart there
+was nothing for Harmony to fear. She knew it. He stood, hat in hand,
+while she went up the staircase. Then:--
+
+“Fraulein!” anxiously.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours hat?”
+
+“I saw no one there.”
+
+“I thank you, Fraulein.”
+
+He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows,
+listened until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he clapped
+his hat on his head and made his cautious way down to the street. There
+was no man in a green velours hat below, but the little spy had an
+uneasy feeling that eyes watched him, nevertheless. Life was growing
+complicated for the Herr Georgiev.
+
+Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a life she
+had never touched before. She discovered, after a day or two in the
+work-room, that Monia Reiff's business lay almost altogether among the
+demi-monde. The sewing-girls, of Marie's type many of them, found in
+the customers endless topics of conversation. Some things Harmony was
+spared, much of the talk being in dialect. But a great deal of it she
+understood, and she learned much that was not spoken. They talked
+freely of the women, their clothes, and they talked a great deal about
+a newcomer, an American dancer, for whom Monia was making an elaborate
+outfit. The American's name was Lillian Le Grande. She was dancing at
+one of the variety theaters.
+
+Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman--a gold brocade
+slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of bodice made of
+gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with Georgiev she met her.
+
+There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping. Monia,
+flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and glanced over the
+girls. She singled out Harmony finally and called her.
+
+“Come and put on the American's gown,” she ordered. “She wishes--Heaven
+knows what she wishes!”
+
+Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein Le
+Grande had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when she found
+herself obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one terrible moment
+before the little dressmaker's amused eyes.
+
+“Thou art very lovely, very chic,” said Monia. The dress added to
+rather than relieved Harmony's discomfiture. She donned it in one of the
+fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining off a corner
+of the large reception room. The slashed skirt embarrassed her; the low
+cut made her shrink. Monia was frankly entranced. Above the gold tissue
+of the bodice rose Harmony's exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold;
+even her eyes looked golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave
+a pull here, a pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the
+things she made!
+
+She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind the
+curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit more of
+the girl's rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the curtain aside
+and stood smiling.
+
+Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second's silence. Then:--
+
+“Exquisite!” she said in English. Then in halting German: “Do not change
+a line. It is perfect.”
+
+Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a glimpse of
+herself and was startled. She had been wearing black for so long, and
+now this radiant golden creature was herself. She was enchanted and
+abashed. The slash in the skirt troubled her: her slender leg had a way
+of revealing itself.
+
+The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered another
+gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the dress and into
+her own shabby frock. On the other side of the curtain the dancer
+was talking. Her voice was loud, but rather agreeable. She smoked a
+cigarette. Scraps of chatter came to Harmony, and once a laugh.
+
+“That is too pink--something more delicate.”
+
+“Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek.”
+
+“I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night.”
+
+“Still no news, Fraulein?”
+
+“None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn't so bad, is it? I could use
+more rouge.”
+
+“It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child could be
+stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!”
+
+The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became nasal,
+full of venom.
+
+“Oh, they know well enough,” she snapped. “Those nurses know, and
+there's a pig of a red-bearded doctor--I'd like to poison him.
+Separating mother and child! I'm going to find him, if only to show them
+they are not so smart after all.”
+
+In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her curtain,
+had clutched at her heart. Jimmy's mother!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony's flight had had nothing to do
+with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and
+besides Peter had indicated that Harmony's absence was purely temporary.
+But the breaking-up was inevitable. All day long the child lay in the
+white bed, apathetic but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies
+for his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite tame, played
+hide-and-seek over the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his
+frantic search for Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to
+him.
+
+He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no
+apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried obediently
+to eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg to be
+taken into the salon, as he once had done. There was a sort of mental
+confusion also. He liked Marie to read his father's letters; but as
+he grew weaker the occasional confusing of Peter with his dead father
+became a fixed idea. Peter was Daddy.
+
+Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony's adjacent
+room and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he
+put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth
+sofa at the foot of Jimmy's bed--lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he
+that the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its
+slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in
+every night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp
+in his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy's thin little
+chest. Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the ears and
+developed lines about his mouth that never left him again. He felt gray
+and old, and sometimes bitter and hard also. The boy's condition could
+not be helped: it was inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was
+eating his heart out had been unnecessary and cruel.
+
+Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he
+wondered how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he hoped
+it was bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night, when the
+lamp burned low and gusts of wind shook the old house, fearful thoughts
+came to him--the canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought reason,
+however. Harmony had been too rational, too sane for such an end.
+
+McLean was Peter's great support in those terrible days. He was young
+and hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to grease the
+machinery of the police service; McLean could and did. In Berlin Harmony
+could not have remained hidden for two days. In Vienna, however, it
+was different. Returns were made to the department, but irregularly.
+An American music student was missing. There were thousands of American
+music students in the city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses.
+McLean offered a reward and followed up innumerable music students.
+
+The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became old and
+haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this difference,
+that with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day.
+With McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following
+morning he went to work with renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after
+all, the iron had not struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a
+life-and-death matter.
+
+Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work. The
+little household went on methodically. Marie remained; there had seemed
+nothing else to do. She cooked Peter's food--what little he would eat;
+she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept
+the apartment neat. She was never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed,
+she seemed to have lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely
+to Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in
+spite of his protests.
+
+The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been music and
+Harmony's soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with
+Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier
+had once vibrated in response to Harmony's violin, almost absolute
+silence now reigned. Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer
+creaked, and the loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had
+been silenced out of deference to the sick child.
+
+On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy's
+mother in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day. McLean
+had sent him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect
+that a young girl answering Harmony's description had been seen in the
+park at Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.
+
+Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had gone out
+together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And it had been as he
+feared--a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing her
+hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.
+
+McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak.
+Then back to the city again.
+
+He had taken to making a daily round, to the master's, to the Frau
+Professor Bergmeister's, along the Graben and the Karntnerstrasse,
+ending up at the Doctors' Club in the faint hope of a letter. Wrath
+still smouldered deep in Peter; he would not enter a room at the club
+if Mrs. Boyer sat within. He had had a long hour with Dr. Jennings,
+and left that cheerful person writhing in abasement. And he had held
+a stormy interview with the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for
+a week, and exceedingly nervous, being of the impression from Peter's
+manner that in the event of Harmony not turning up an American gunboat
+would sail up the right arm of the Danube and bombard the Pension
+Schwarz.
+
+Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the city
+in the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean's elasticity was
+deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into crowds, had taken on a
+strained, concentrated look.
+
+Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man's ultrafashionable
+dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms dangling between his knees,
+his head down. Their common trouble had drawn the two together, or had
+drawn McLean close to Peter, as if he recognized that there were degrees
+in grief and that Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old
+rage at Peter had died. Harmony's flight had proved the situation as no
+amount of protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the
+girl; then he and Peter would start even, and the battle to the best
+man.
+
+They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since he sat
+down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted down from day
+to day such details of their search as might be worth keeping. Now and
+then he glanced at Peter as if he wished to say something, hesitated,
+fell to work again over the notebook. Finally he ventured.
+
+“How's the boy?”
+
+“Not so well to-day. I'm having a couple of men in to see him to-night.
+He doesn't sleep.”
+
+“Do you sleep?”
+
+“Not much. He's on my mind, of course.”
+
+That and other things, Peter.
+
+“Don't you think--wouldn't it be better to have a nurse. You can't go
+like this all day and be up all night, you know. And Marie has him most
+of the day.” McLean, of course, had known Marie before. “The boy ought
+to have a nurse, I think.”
+
+“He doesn't move without my hearing him.”
+
+“That's an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?”
+
+Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which exasperation
+struggled with fatigue.
+
+“Good Lord, boy,” he rasped, “don't you suppose I'd have a nurse if I
+could afford it?”
+
+“Would you let me help? I'd like to do something. I'm a useless cub in
+a sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked in the
+hospital?”
+
+“Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I shouldn't
+let you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but--if he would be
+happier--”
+
+“That's settled, then,” said McLean. “Nurse Elisabet, if she can come.
+And--look here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for a week and
+haven't had the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it
+back when you get it, any time, a year or ten years. I'll not miss it.”
+
+But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
+
+“I can't take anything now,” he said. “But I'll remember it, and if
+things get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to live.
+Marie is a good manager, almost as good as--Harmony was.” This with
+difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat
+seemed to close on the name.
+
+That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to
+see Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know,
+would never notice.
+
+At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev,
+got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the
+platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going
+well with him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face
+suspiciously, until they came to a rest on Peter.
+
+It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits
+he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's
+despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a
+touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination,
+recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension
+Schwarz--and built him a little story that was not far from the truth.
+
+Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade,
+when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people,
+when Demel's was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with
+military men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when
+the flower women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in
+roses, when sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the
+Cathedral, when the lottery did the record business of the day.
+
+It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might
+happen on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as in a
+crowd, with people close, touching her, men staring at her, following
+her. He had spent a frightful night in the Opera, scanning seat after
+seat, not so much because he hoped to find her as because inaction was
+intolerable.
+
+And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the
+Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He even
+peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared
+that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in
+the early days of the winter.
+
+Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because
+of the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place
+where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where
+because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as
+it passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser's window, where a
+brilliant light shone on each face that passed.
+
+Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the
+desk spoke of him: “He is there again, the gray man!”
+
+“Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!”
+
+“Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.”
+
+“More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American.”
+
+“He is Russian. Look at his size.”
+
+“But his shoes!” triumphantly. “They are American, little one.”
+
+The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden
+rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.
+
+“I think he is of the police,” she said, “or a spy. There is much talk
+of war.”
+
+“Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such
+sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white.”
+
+“The rose, Fraulein.”
+
+The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer.
+The customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange
+intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious
+clutch at her heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to
+fetch the golden rose that was to complete Le Grande's costume.
+
+She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another
+exit.
+
+She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of
+Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking
+along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and
+steady ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.
+
+It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed
+to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for
+her. And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even
+then he had not said he loved her--had not even known it, to be exact.
+Nor had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him
+out of her life.
+
+The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so
+enlightening as to poor Peter's quest, that Peter was growing thin and
+white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own
+position to realize Peter's. With the glimpse of him came a great
+longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy's arms about
+her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating
+harmlessly against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the
+brick stove, for Peter.
+
+Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant,
+at the best, adding to Peter's burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the
+old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the
+respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What
+if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not
+let his mother see him!
+
+Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom
+until eight o'clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked
+over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had
+seen him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping
+watch over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady
+eyes for her.
+
+No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the
+sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places.
+But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her,
+became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see
+once again the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp, the flicker that was
+the fire.
+
+She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She
+put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.
+
+The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted.
+She achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car
+was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was
+white and frightened when she reached the car.
+
+The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
+delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light
+was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the
+money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
+
+The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
+the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky,
+its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by
+the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her.
+Peter's lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight
+from the salon windows. The light was not regular--it disappeared at
+regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some
+one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and
+forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always
+paced the door.
+
+She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
+falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
+cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower
+and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure.
+No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in
+the wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to
+the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of
+the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.
+
+Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's
+windows--and Peter's--opened toward the back of the house, where in
+a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and
+where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless
+desire to see at least the light from the child's room possessed
+Harmony. Even the light would be something; to go like this, to carry
+with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was
+unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden
+and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be
+something.
+
+She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for
+her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her
+window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours
+of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So
+Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the
+corner of the old lodge and thus to the courtyard.
+
+Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving
+shadows; on Jimmy's window-sill a jar of milk. And voices--some one was
+singing.
+
+Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to
+sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little
+song Harmony had been wont to sing:--
+
+“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human
+eyes. And in the--hereafter--angels may
+
+    Roll--the--stone--from--its--grave--away.”
+
+Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether.
+Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down
+the gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a
+minute, two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks
+of the Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old
+city, so very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.
+
+Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away.
+Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood
+by the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered
+Harmony somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the
+night before he went away:--
+
+“Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony.”
+
+The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the
+great tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below.
+Peter struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated
+his face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.
+
+“Good-night, Peter,” whispered Harmony. “Good-night, dear.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by
+relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about
+again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little
+less florid. But the week's confinement had given him an opportunity to
+think over many things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he
+had packed up the last of Marie's small belongings and sent them down to
+Vienna.
+
+Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. “Just how much talk do you
+suppose this has made, Byrne?” he asked.
+
+“Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it,
+you know.”
+
+Stewart's brows contracted.
+
+“Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!”
+
+“Probably.”
+
+Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she had
+been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.
+
+“Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?”
+
+“No,” doggedly.
+
+“I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but--you can't get away with
+it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another.”
+
+“What's that?”
+
+“Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and
+not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to
+it.”
+
+“She wouldn't understand in a thousand years.”
+
+“Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea
+that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow.
+A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a
+man has done with his life before a girl--the right girl--comes into
+it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life
+then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she
+chooses.”
+
+“How many would choose under those circumstances?” he jibed.
+
+Peter smiled. “Quite a few,” he said cheerfully. “It's a wrong system,
+of course; but we can get a little truth out of it.”
+
+“You can't get away with it” stuck in Stewart's mind for several days.
+It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had
+recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell
+Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the
+affair against his conscience and came out victorious.
+
+Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they
+complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the
+bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by
+midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid
+citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her
+traveling. In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in
+the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take
+the baths.
+
+It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after
+the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon's treatment called
+for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and
+rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is
+the remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with
+any hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and
+looked haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to
+leave.
+
+He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and
+mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was
+quiet, and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita's sitting
+room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer
+chair.
+
+Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond
+and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses
+along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light
+was extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train
+crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling
+from burrow to burrow.
+
+The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her
+there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were
+times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked
+into hers with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would
+glance away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps
+the situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her
+by its unusualness.
+
+To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely,
+without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for
+something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than
+ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the
+thing, of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita,
+barely twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the
+world, not so deep as Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would
+have been merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In
+that case she might be less than just, or more.
+
+Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech,
+very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at,
+keenly alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew
+not what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully
+potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger
+on her arm.
+
+He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story--a preamble about his
+upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna,
+his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From
+that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.
+
+It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through
+love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of
+fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him,
+this first evening absolutely alone with her. That and her nearness, and
+the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm. Still he had not touched her.
+
+The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that. General
+credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first. How
+many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from
+chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips
+last. The woman is in his arms before he tells his love. It is by her
+response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the
+thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct.
+Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl's hand, gained
+an encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no
+rebuff would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words?
+They would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify
+it.
+
+But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness stood
+between them and must be painfully taken down.
+
+“I'm afraid this is stupid for you,” said Anita out of the silence.
+“Would you like to go to the music-room?”
+
+“God forbid. I was thinking.”
+
+“Of what?” Encouragement this, surely.
+
+“I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up.”
+
+“Really? I?”
+
+“You know that.”
+
+“How did I stir it up?”
+
+“That's hardly the way I meant to put it. You've changed everything for
+me. I care for you--a very great deal.”
+
+He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he did not
+touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in this fashion, or
+was he making love?
+
+“I'm very glad you like me.”
+
+“Like you!” Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice was
+unmistakable. “It's much more than that, Anita, so much more that I'm
+going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help a little?”
+
+“Yes, if I can.” She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.
+
+Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face set and
+dogged.
+
+“Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?”
+
+“No. There's a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all these
+places, isn't there?”
+
+“This was not an accident.”
+
+“No?”
+
+“The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send us
+over the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime.”
+
+After a brief silence--
+
+“Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?”
+
+“Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman--a girl, Anita. A girl I
+had been living with.”
+
+A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For he was
+quivering with dread when he said it--the courage of the man who faces
+a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would have broken into
+speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and was silent. Stewart
+watched her as best he could in the darkness, trying to gather further
+courage to go on. He could not see her face, but her fingers, touching
+the edge of the chair, quivered.
+
+“May I tell you the rest?”
+
+“I don't think I want to hear it.”
+
+“Are you going to condemn me unheard?”
+
+“There isn't anything you can say against the fact?”
+
+But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he made
+his plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what had happened
+simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort. And he emphasized the
+lack of sentiment that prompted the arrangement.
+
+Anita spoke then for the first time: “And when you tried to terminate it
+she attempted to kill you!”
+
+“I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then neglected her
+for you.”
+
+“Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her.”
+
+“It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear that,
+Anita. But lately, in the last month or two, she--I suppose I should
+have seen that she--”
+
+“That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?”
+
+“Nineteen.”
+
+A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had watched her
+with wide, almost childish eyes.
+
+“Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train coming
+up?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Where is she now?”
+
+“In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came up
+to see me after the--after the accident, sent her away. I think he's
+looking after her. I haven't heard from him.”
+
+“Why did you tell me all this?”
+
+“Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me.”
+
+“What! After that?”
+
+“That, or something similar, is in many men's lives. They don't tell it,
+that's the difference. I 'm not taking any credit for telling you this.
+I'm ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when I look at your bandaged
+arm I'm suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to tell you. He said I couldn't
+get away with it; some time or other it would come out. Then he said
+something else. He said you'd probably understand, and that if you
+married me it was better to start with a clean slate.”
+
+No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of fact, an
+offer--his past against hers, his future with hers. Her hand was steady
+now. The light in the priest's house had been extinguished. The chill of
+the mountain night penetrated Anita's white furs; and set her--or was it
+the chill?--to shivering.
+
+“If I had not told you, would you have married me?”
+
+“I think so. I'll be honest, too. Yes.”
+
+“I am the same man you would have married. Only--more honest.”
+
+“I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold.”
+
+Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas hugged
+the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside was the little
+balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing and looked down,
+down. Some of the arrogance of his new virtue left the man. He was
+suddenly humbled. For the first time he realized a part of what Marie
+had endured in that small room where the light burned.
+
+“Poor little Marie!” he said softly.
+
+The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he could have
+made. Anita rose and held out her hand.
+
+“Go and see her,” she said quietly. “You owe her that. We'll be leaving
+here in a day or so and I'll not see you again. But you've been honest,
+and I will be honest, too. I--I cared a great deal, too.”
+
+“And this has killed it?”
+
+“I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think.”
+
+“But if you are going away--I'm afraid to leave you. You'll think this
+thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you've been taught will
+come--”
+
+“Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise.”
+
+He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.
+
+“I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?” humbly.
+
+“I do not want you to kiss me.”
+
+He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the darkness. If
+he could only have crushed her to him, made her feel the security of his
+love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier of his own building was
+between them. His voice was husky.
+
+“I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the thing
+that concerns us both--I love you. I never loved the other woman. I
+never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing more like that.”
+
+“I shall try to remember.”
+
+Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the doctor
+and the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart again. But
+before she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre at the door, she
+went out on the terrace, and looked across to the Villa Waldheim, rising
+from among its clustering trees. Although it was too far to be certain,
+she thought she saw the figure of a man on the little balcony standing
+with folded arms, gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.
+
+Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his promise
+in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of the following
+day, for Vienna. The strain of the confession was over, but he was a
+victim of sickening dread. To one thing only he dared to pin his hopes.
+Anita had said she cared, cared a great deal. And, after all, what else
+mattered? The story had been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of
+queer ideas of right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!
+
+He arrived in Vienna at nine o'clock that night. The imminence of
+his interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a hurried
+supper, and calling up the Doctors' Club by telephone found Peter's
+address in the Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea, of course, that Marie
+was there. He wanted to see Peter to learn where Marie had taken refuge,
+and incidentally to get from Peter a fresh supply of moral courage for
+the interview. For he needed courage. In vain on the journey down had he
+clothed himself in armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment
+in the train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a
+luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this station she
+had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a nap. Ah, but again,
+at this part of the journey he had first seen Anita!
+
+He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter's manner
+of living those days was exceedingly vague. He had respected Peter's
+reticence, after the manner of men with each other. Peter had once
+mentioned a boy he was looking after, in excuse for leaving so soon
+after the accident. That was all.
+
+The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted. The
+street was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart found the
+gate. Even then he lost the path, and found himself among a group of
+trees, to touch the lowest branches of any of which resulted in a shower
+of raindrops. To add to his discomfort some one was walking in the
+garden, coming toward him with light, almost stealthy steps.
+
+Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached, were
+very close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness that even then
+all he saw was a blacker shadow, and that was visible only because it
+moved. Then a hand touched his arm, stopped as if paralyzed, drew back
+slowly, fearfully.
+
+“Good Heavens!” said poor Harmony faintly.
+
+“Please don't be alarmed. I have lost the path.” Stewart's voice was
+almost equally nervous. “Is it to the right or the left?”
+
+It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:--
+
+“To the right a dozen paces or so.”
+
+“Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it.”
+
+“I know it quite well. Please don't bother.”
+
+The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn on
+Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking God's own
+language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance, they made the path.
+
+“The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order.”
+
+“Are you not coming in?”
+
+“No. I--I do not live here.”
+
+She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark facade
+of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment later heard
+the closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort of curious place
+was this, a great looming house that concealed in its garden a fugitive
+American girl who came and went like a shadow, leaving only the memory
+of a sweet voice strained with fright?
+
+Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the Portier
+gave him and followed the gentleman's gruff directions up the staircase.
+Peter admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as well he might with Marie
+in the salon.
+
+Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter's expression. He shook the
+rain off his hat, smiling.
+
+“How are you?” asked Peter dutifully.
+
+“Pretty good, except for a headache when I'm tired. What sort of a place
+have you got here anyhow, Byrne?”
+
+“Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,” replied Peter, still preoccupied
+with Marie and what was coming. “Rather interesting old place.”
+
+“Rather,” commented Stewart, “with goddesses in the garden and all the
+usual stunts.”
+
+“Goddesses?”
+
+“Ran into one just now among the trees. 'A woman I forswore, but thou
+being a goddess I forswore not thee.' English-speaking goddess, by
+George!”
+
+Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and grasped
+his arm in fingers of steel.
+
+“For Heaven's sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in the
+garden?”
+
+Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle a
+situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.
+
+“I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke through a
+hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the compass--”
+
+Peter's fingers closed.
+
+“Quick,” he said.
+
+Stewart's manner lost its jauntiness.
+
+“There was a girl there,” he said shortly. “Couldn't see her. She spoke
+English. Said she didn't live here, and broke for the gate the minute I
+got to the path.”
+
+“You didn't see her?”
+
+“No. Nice voice, though. Young.”
+
+The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was running
+down the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to the Portier to
+unlock the door, was a madman in everything but purpose. The Portier let
+him out and returned to the bedroom.
+
+“The boy above is worse,” he said briefly. “A strange doctor has just
+come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug store.”
+
+The Portier's wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled her
+eyes.
+
+“What can one expect?” she demanded. “The good Herr Gott has forbidden
+theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the druggist has gone to
+visit his wife's mother.”
+
+“Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up.”
+
+“And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I shall
+go.”
+
+Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.
+
+Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found Peter's
+excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived, an old house,
+isolated in a garden where rambled young women with soft voices. Hello,
+a youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.
+
+He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie. The place
+was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the indescribable odor of
+drugs that meant illness. He remembered that the boy was frail.
+
+Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose,
+white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each other.
+Marie's crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger than speech. It
+was after a distinct pause that she spoke.
+
+“Hast thou brought the police?”
+
+Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart's mental
+condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it was with
+tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And yet--
+
+“So it's old Peter now, is it?”
+
+“No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all. I swear
+it. I look after the boy.”
+
+“Who else is here?”
+
+“No one else; but--”
+
+“Tell that rot to some one who does not know you.”
+
+“It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not lie.”
+ There was a catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men somewhat, but she
+still cherished the feminine belief that jealousy is love, whereas it is
+only injured pride. She took a step toward him. “Walter, I am sorry. Do
+you hate me?” She had dropped the familiar “thou.”
+
+Stewart crossed the room until only Peter's table and lamp stood between
+them.
+
+“I didn't mean to be brutal,” he said, rather largely, entirely
+conscious of his own magnanimity. “It was pretty bad up there and I
+know it. I don't hate you, of course. That's hardly possible
+after--everything.”
+
+“You--would take me back?”
+
+“No. It's over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that's all; to
+see that you were comfortable and not frightened. You're a silly child
+to think of the police.”
+
+Marie put a hand to her throat.
+
+“It is the American, of course.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. “Then I wish I had
+killed her!”
+
+No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman for her
+rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation in hand and
+Marie only feebly formidable, was rather amused and flattered by the
+honest fury in her voice. The mouse was under his paw; he would play a
+bit. “You'll get over feeling that way, kid. You don't really love me.”
+
+“You were my God, that is all.”
+
+“Will you let me help you--money, I mean?”
+
+“Keep it for her.”
+
+“Peter will be here in a minute.” He bent over the table and eyed her
+with his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. “Come round here and
+kiss me for old times.”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Come.”
+
+She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a step or
+two toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew himself up.
+
+“You are quite right and I'm a rotter.” Marie's English did not
+comprehend “rotter,” but she knew the tone. “Listen, Marie, I've told
+the other girl, and there's a chance for me, anyhow. Some day she may
+marry me. She asked me to see you.”
+
+“I do not wish her pity.”
+
+“You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say, without a
+dot. There is a chance in America for a clever girl. You are clever,
+little Marie. The first money I can spare I'll send you--if you'll take
+it. It's all I can do.”
+
+This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled from
+him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an explanation.
+When at last she understood that he was sincere, she broke down.
+Stewart, playing a new part and raw in it, found the situation
+irritating. But Marie's tears were not entirely bitter. Back of them her
+busy young mind was weaving a new warp of life, with all of America for
+its loom. Hope that had died lived again. Before her already lay that
+great country where women might labor and live by the fruit of their
+labor, where her tawdry past would be buried in the center of distant
+Europe. New life beckoned to the little Marie that night in the old
+salon of Maria Theresa, beckoned to her as it called to Stewart,
+opportunity to one, love and work to the other. To America!
+
+“I will go,” she said at last simply. “And I will not trouble you
+there.”
+
+“Good!” Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick
+gesture she held it to her cheek, dropped it.
+
+Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He had
+not found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well, still in
+Vienna, and--she had come back! She had cared then enough to come back.
+To-morrow he would commence again, would comb the city fine, and when
+he had found her he would bring her back, the wanderer, to a marvelous
+welcome.
+
+He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few
+belongings by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still stained
+with tears but radiant with hope.
+
+“Peter,” she said gravely, “I must prepare my outfit. I go to America.”
+
+“With Stewart?”
+
+“Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am very
+happy, although--Peter, may I kiss you?”
+
+“Certainly,” said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her thin
+shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who had cared
+enough to come back.
+
+“Life,” said Peter soberly, “life is just one damned thing after
+another, isn't it?”
+
+But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.
+
+The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She said:--
+
+“I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt you
+very much--but not, believe me, without hurting myself. Perhaps my
+uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing you, that I am not
+so big as you thought I would be. For now, in this final letter, I can
+tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear, I did care!
+
+“But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have gone
+very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy as I have
+does not support me to-night, that all my little rules of life are
+inadequate. Individual liberty was one--but there is no liberty of the
+individual. Life--other lives--press too closely. You, living your life
+as seemed best and easiest, and carrying down with you into shipwreck
+the little Marie and--myself!
+
+“For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It is not
+only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady revolt
+and loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest before one
+succumbs to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred that is a part of
+me and that would never forget.
+
+“You say that you are the same man I would have married, only more
+honest for concealing nothing. But--and forgive me this, it insists on
+coming up in my mind--were you honest, really? You told me, and it took
+courage, but wasn't it partly fear? What motive is unmixed? Honesty--and
+fear, Walter. You were preparing against a contingency, although you may
+not admit this to yourself.
+
+“I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am only
+trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break is final. The
+revolt is in myself, against something sordid and horrible which I will
+not take into my life. And for that reason time will make no difference.
+
+“I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great deal of
+this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter--home and children, the
+love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals. And you ask me to
+start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know you are resentful, but--I
+know that you understand.
+
+“ANITA.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine was
+threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with Bulgaria
+sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing troops, and there
+were long conferences in the Burg between the Emperor and various
+bearded gentlemen, while the military prayed in the churches for war.
+
+The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on all day
+in the small room below Harmony's on the Wollbadgasse. At night,
+when the man in the green velours hat took a little sleep, mysterious
+packages were carried down the whitewashed staircase and loaded into
+wagons waiting below. Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the
+pigeons a carrier pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.
+
+On the morning after Harmony's flight from the garden in the Street
+of Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She had put in
+a sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She charged herself with
+cowardice in running away from Peter and Jimmy when they needed her, and
+in going back like a thief the night before. The conviction that the boy
+was not so well brought with it additional introspection--her sacrifice
+seemed useless, almost childish. She had fled because two men thought
+it necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and she
+did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had promised
+herself, had been promised. But this career, for which she had given up
+everything else--would she find it in the workroom of a dressmaker?
+
+Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose--how her cheeks burned
+when she thought of it!--suppose she had taken Peter at his word and
+married him? What about Peter's career? Was there any way by which
+Peter's poverty for one would be comfort for two? Was there any
+reason why Peter, with his splendid ability, should settle down to the
+hack-work of general practice, the very slough out of which he had so
+painfully climbed?
+
+Either of two things--go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or stay
+where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew. There in
+the little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held out her arms
+longingly. “Peter!” she said. “Peter, dear!”
+
+She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no one.
+The instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at any cost
+outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard and tired, looking
+out. It was Harmony's chance, perhaps, to do a big thing; to prove
+herself bigger than her fears, stronger than convention. But she was
+young, bewildered, afraid. And there was this element, stronger than
+any of the others--Peter had never told her he loved her. To go back,
+throwing herself again on his mercy, was unthinkable. On his love--that
+was different. But what if he did not love her? He had been good to her;
+but then Peter was good to every one.
+
+There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his mother?
+Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose he were to die
+and his mother not see him? Harmony's sense of fairness rebelled. In the
+small community at home mother was sacred, her claims insistent.
+
+It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on the sill;
+over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous strip foretold the
+sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the market, lumbered along the
+streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony rose and lighted her fire, drew on
+her slippers and the faded silk kimono with the pink butterflies.
+
+In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early morning
+dreams of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining customers.
+
+Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in order, fed
+the pigeons,--it was then she saw the carrier with its message,--made
+her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside the stove. And all the
+time, moving quietly through her morning routine, she was there in that
+upper room in body only.
+
+In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in the
+Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the hutch, and
+Peter, with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed, toilet-table,
+coffee-pot, Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise over the church roof,
+and Peter again. Always Peter!
+
+Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear her,
+muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the Hungarian
+maid for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one of her new
+duties to prepare the workroom for the day. The luminous streak above
+the church was rose now, time for the day to begin.
+
+She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the door, so
+faint was the sound.
+
+She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony, expecting
+Monia, called “Come in.”
+
+It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face. He
+stood in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear toward the
+stairway. It was very silent. Monia was drinking her coffee in bed,
+whither she had retired for warmth.
+
+“Pardon!” said the Bulgarian in a whisper. “I listened until I heard you
+moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!”
+
+“Something has happened!” exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter, of
+course.
+
+“Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor to
+open your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I fear--on
+the sill, Fraulein.”
+
+Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once, but the
+carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and set about its
+breakfast.
+
+“Will he let me catch him?”
+
+“Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter--”
+
+“Come in, of course.”
+
+Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A handful of
+grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown! Georgiev caught
+the pigeon and drew the message from the tube. Even Harmony grasped the
+seriousness of the situation. The little Bulgarian's face, from gray
+became livid; tiny beads of cold sweat came out on his forehead.
+
+“What have I done?” cried Harmony. “Oh, what have I done? If I had known
+about the pigeon--”
+
+Georgiev recovered himself.
+
+“The Fraulein can do nothing wrong,” he said. “It is a matter of an
+hour's delay, that is all. It may not be too late.”
+
+Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee. The
+sulky Hungarian brought it without a glance in their direction.
+
+“Too late for what?”
+
+“Fraulein, if I may trouble you--but glance from the window to the
+street below. It is of an urgency, or I--Please, Fraulein!”
+
+Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind
+her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in her head.
+
+“Only a man in a green hat,” she said. “And down the street a group of
+soldiers.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.
+
+“They are coming for you?”
+
+“It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna.”
+
+“And I with the pigeon--Oh, it's too horrible! Herr Georgiev, stay here
+in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is mine--”
+
+“Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the
+pigeon. It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but a
+matter of--imprisonment.”
+
+“There must be something I can do,” desperately. “I hear them below. Is
+there no way to the roof, no escape?”
+
+“None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of
+peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you.”
+
+“You are not going down!”
+
+“Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly,
+and not for a lady to confront.”
+
+“They are coming up!”
+
+He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
+unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest,
+turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.
+
+His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.
+
+“Fraulein,” he said huskily, “you are very lovely. I carry always in my
+heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu.”
+
+He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down
+the staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap
+on the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have
+feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable
+like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as
+unobtrusively as he had entered it.
+
+The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
+washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered
+what was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief
+are great moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message,
+English, German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.
+
+“The Herr Georgiev has been arrested,” she wrote. An hour later the
+carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over
+the church roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life.
+Grim-visaged war had touched her and passed on.
+
+The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building
+followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned
+out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden
+hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor was found stored a quantity of
+ammunition.
+
+It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished,
+when the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the
+chattering sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way
+to her dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.
+
+She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully
+descended.
+
+“I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live.”
+
+The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her
+ears; the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from
+the workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition
+boxes on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.
+
+Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in,
+toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.
+
+“You!” she said.
+
+The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, “Yea, yea,” and
+“Nay, nay.”
+
+“Yes, Fraulein.”
+
+Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal, infinitely
+touching.
+
+“You will not say that you have found, have seen me?”
+
+“No, Fraulein.”
+
+It was in Harmony's mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to learn--of
+Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that belonged to the old
+life in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was no time. The sentry's
+impassive face became rigid; he looked through her, not at her. Harmony
+turned.
+
+The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was no
+further chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the boxes
+down the staircase.
+
+Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in the
+market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in the
+Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony's golden head as she bent over a bit
+of chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the whitewashed staircase
+her heavy cans of milk; on the carrier pigeon winging its way to the
+south; beating in through bars to the exalted face of Herr Georgiev;
+resting on Peter's drooping shoulders, on the neglected mice and the
+wooden soldier, on the closed eyes of a sick child--the worshiped sun,
+peering forth--the golden window of the East.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through
+the night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had
+been times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With
+the daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of
+hope, enough to make harder Peter's acceptance of the inevitable.
+
+The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened
+his eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter
+died many deaths that night.
+
+At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie,
+creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently
+asleep and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at
+her footstep and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He
+motioned her back.
+
+“But you must have a little sleep, Peter.”
+
+“No. I'll stay until--Go back to bed. It is very early.”
+
+Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now
+it was useless. At eight o'clock he let Marie take his place, then he
+bathed and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another
+night. For the child's release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast,
+but managed only a cup of coffee.
+
+Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was
+insistent--the boy's mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her.
+Peter might know in his heart that he had done the best thing for the
+child, but like Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse
+him. He had separated mother and child. Who was he to have decided the
+mother's unfitness, to have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the
+lives of others in his hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where;
+the boy dying without his mother. Whatever that mother might be, her
+place that day was with her boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He
+was humbled as well as stricken, poor Peter!
+
+In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the
+mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter,
+signed only “Mamma,” was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.
+
+“And for Heaven's sake be quick,” wrote Peter. “This is a matter of
+hours. I meant well, but I've done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no
+matter what she is or where you find her.” The Portier carried the note.
+When he came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and
+a lettuce leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and
+amuse the boy. He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. “He saw
+it not,” he reported sadly to his wife. “Be off to the church while
+I deliver this letter. And this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in
+remembrance.”
+
+At eleven o'clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair
+sofa.
+
+“He asks for you.”
+
+Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy's eyes were open and
+fixed on him.
+
+“Is it another day?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, boy; another morning.”
+
+“I am cold, Peter.”
+
+They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he
+could see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very
+humble, found himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To
+see this small soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a
+bit of light for the journey! Peter's religion had been one of life and
+living, not of creed.
+
+Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.
+
+“He knows, poor little one!” she whispered.
+
+And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of
+broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the
+cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from
+the boy.
+
+“One is sick, Jimmy boy,” he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and
+shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:--
+
+“If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?”
+
+“Yes, honey, I think so.”
+
+The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind
+too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed
+eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter
+bent over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.
+
+“What is it, dear?”
+
+“I'm afraid--it's going to die!”
+
+“Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?” asked Peter gently. “To go to
+heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer
+and the sun always shines?”
+
+No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed
+its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their
+dead mother.
+
+“Is there grass?”
+
+“Yes--soft green grass.”
+
+“Do--boys in heaven--go in their bare feet?” Ah, small mind and heart,
+so terrified and yet so curious!
+
+“Indeed, yes.” And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted
+such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint--a
+heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of
+dear departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees
+in fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with
+smiling eyes and death in his heart, a child's heaven of games and
+friendly Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.
+
+The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was
+increasingly an effort.
+
+“I should--like--to go there,” he whispered at last.
+
+He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk
+he roused again.
+
+“I would like--to see--the sentry,” he said with difficulty.
+
+And so again, and for the last time, Rosa's soldier from Salzburg with
+one lung.
+
+Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed
+muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears. Monia, upset over the
+morning's excitement, was irritable and unreasonable. The gold-tissue
+costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint. Below in the
+courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where
+the morning had seen such occurrences.
+
+At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of
+salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of
+playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour
+of the day. To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia
+quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the
+pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play
+such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her
+whole beautiful face and body glowing with the melody she made, the
+girls found the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she
+did not suspect it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the workroom.
+She was not of the people, they said--the daughter of a great American,
+of course, run away to escape a loveless marriage. This was borne out
+by the report of one of them who had glimpsed the silk petticoat. It
+was rumored also that she wore no chemise, but instead an infinitely
+coquettish series of lace and nainsook garments--of a fineness!
+
+Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not played
+since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to Peter as she
+had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little Georgiev as he went
+down the staircase. And finally with a choke in her throat to the little
+mother back home, so hopeful, so ignorant.
+
+In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of the day
+at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd and coming back
+quickly through the winter night. The staircase was always a peril, to
+be encountered and conquered night after night and even in the daytime
+not to be lightly regarded. On her way up this night she heard steps
+ahead, heavy, measured steps that climbed steadily without pauses. For
+an instant Harmony thought it sounded like Peter's step and she went
+dizzy.
+
+But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had stood
+that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels in, toes out,
+chest out, was the sentry.
+
+Harmony's first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the
+building. Then she saw that the sentry's impassive face wore lines of
+trouble. He saluted. “Please, Fraulein.”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I have not told the Herr Doktor.”
+
+“I thank you.”
+
+“But the child dies.”
+
+“Jimmy?”
+
+“He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps, but of
+moments.”
+
+Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. “You are sure? You
+are not telling me so that I will go back?”
+
+“He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours. My
+wife, Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and her cousin,
+the wife of the Portier, weeps over the stove. Please, Fraulein, come
+with me.”
+
+“When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?”
+
+“But now.”
+
+“And he still lives?”
+
+“Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you.”
+
+Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all that was
+personal and small and frightened, before the reality of death. She
+rose, as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis; ceased trembling,
+got her hat and coat and her shabby gloves and joined the sentry again.
+Another moment's delay--to secure the Le Grande's address from Monia.
+Then out into the night, Harmony to the Siebensternstrasse, the tall
+soldier to find the dancer at her hotel, or failing that, at the
+Ronacher Music-Hall.
+
+Harmony took a taxicab--nothing must be spared now--bribed the chauffeur
+to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across the garden, still
+tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper flight, and rang the
+bell.
+
+Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was
+nothing to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in hand,
+alone, drear, tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw Harmony and
+went white, holding to the back of his chair. Their eyes met, agony
+and hope in them, love and death, rapture and bitterness. In Harmony's,
+pleading, promise, something of doubt; in Peter's, only yearning, as of
+empty arms. Then Harmony dared to look at the bed and fell on her knees
+in a storm of grief beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her
+hair.
+
+Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the immense
+theater waiters scurried back and forward among the tables. Everywhere
+was the clatter of silver and steel on porcelain, the clink of glasses.
+Smoke was everywhere--pipes, cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between
+bites at the tables, using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a
+gold one shone here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners,
+spraying the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the
+stage sat the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph. They
+were drinking cheap native wines and were very happy.
+
+From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the people to
+her.
+
+“In the box--don't stare, Liebchen, he looks--is the princeling I have
+told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids.”
+
+“Last night! Were you here?” He coughed.
+
+“I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when she
+finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and tosses
+them to her.”
+
+“Shameless! Is she so beautiful?”
+
+“No. But you shall see. She comes.”
+
+Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the program;
+and because she sang in American, which is not exactly English and more
+difficult to understand, her songs were considered exceedingly risque.
+As a matter of fact they were merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to
+them that caught the Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentimental
+ditties and the artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another
+reason for her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen
+pickaninnies.
+
+In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the
+little chorus had made good.
+
+Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind
+her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet
+coats and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a pair sat on the
+boot.
+
+Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing against
+dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by cigarettes and
+absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled their American prototypes
+as the night resembles the day.
+
+She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
+rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve little
+darkies.
+
+She sang “Dixie,” of course, and the “Old Folks at Home”; then a ragtime
+medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and clogging with
+all their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a whirling, nimble
+dance. The little rhinestones on her stockings flashed; her opulent
+bosom quivered. The Dozent, eyes on the dancer, squeezed his companion's
+hand.
+
+“I love thee!” he whispered, rather flushed.
+
+And then she sang “Doan ye cry, mah honey.” Her voice, rather coarse but
+melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing and lilt of the
+lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling, preternaturally solemn,
+linked arms and swayed rhythmically, right, left, right, left. The
+glasses ceased clinking; sturdy citizens forgot their steak and beer
+for a moment and listened, knife and fork poised. Under the table the
+Dozent's hand pressed its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer
+on Le Grande, but on the woman across, his sweetheart, she who would
+be mother of his children. The words meant little to the audience; the
+rich, rolling Southern lullaby held them rapt:--
+
+     “Doan ye Cry, mah honey--
+     Doan ye weep no mo',
+     Mammy's gwine to hold her baby,
+     All de udder black trash sleepin' on the flo',”
+
+The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.
+
+She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against her
+breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The crowd
+applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung them. Glasses
+and dishes clinked again.
+
+The Dozent bent across the table.
+
+“Some day--” he said.
+
+The girl blushed.
+
+Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little troupe.
+A motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off, rounded them up
+like a flock of chickens.
+
+And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier of the
+old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room. For a moment
+gold dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted each other. Then the
+sentry touched his cap.
+
+“Madam,” he said, “the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and to-night
+he dies.”
+
+“What child?” Her arms were full of flowers.
+
+“The child from the hospital. Please to make haste.”
+
+Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with one hand
+in Harmony's and one between Peter's two big ones.
+
+Toward the last he called Peter “Daddy” and asked for a drink. His eyes,
+moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the grayfaced woman
+in a gold dress who stood staring down at him, rested a moment on the
+cage of mice, came to a stop in the doorway, where stood the sentry,
+white and weary, but refusing rest.
+
+It was Harmony who divined the child's unspoken wish.
+
+“The manual?” she whispered.
+
+The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across from
+the old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but no lack of
+vigor, went again through the Austrian manual of arms, and because he
+had no carbine he used Peter's old walking-stick.
+
+When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay still.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony he
+loved her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had about given
+out, and there was no way to get more save by earning it. The drain of
+Jimmy's illness, the inevitable expense of the small grave and the tiny
+stone Peter had insisted on buying, had made retreat his only course.
+True, Le Grande had wished to defray all expenses, but Peter was
+inexorable. No money earned as the dancer earned hers should purchase
+peaceful rest for the loved little body. And after seeing Peter's eyes
+the dancer had not insisted.
+
+A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference between
+Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart raised the money
+somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and eager, with the pin he had
+sent her to Semmering at her throat. She kissed Peter on the cheek in
+the station, rather to his embarrassment. From the lowered window, as
+the train pulled out, she waved a moist handkerchief.
+
+“I shall be very good,” she promised him. The last words he heard above
+the grinding of the train were her cheery: “To America!”
+
+Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food
+where he might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the
+delicatessen shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the
+house in the Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until
+Marie's small preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter
+was at the station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her
+address. She wrote:--
+
+“You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before
+and that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in
+the Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have
+been trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for
+me. You must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I
+am managing well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening
+lesson, and soon I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can
+see how things are looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to
+renew my music lessons. And then, Peter,--the career!
+
+“HARMONY.”
+
+Her address was beneath.
+
+Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with
+the letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer
+her nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps,
+surely, everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only
+once taken the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life
+itself to him. But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in
+everything else, had sapped his confidence.
+
+He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself
+confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined
+face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child's head
+against its breast.
+
+So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must
+let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to
+success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had
+proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care
+of herself in the old city. Only--to go away and leave her there!
+
+McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in the
+Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen
+during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony's every word, every
+gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard work began to tell on
+her, McLean's devotion would win its reward. McLean's devotion, with
+all that it meant, the lessons again, community of taste, their common
+youth! Peter felt old, very tired.
+
+Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his gray
+suit to the Portier's wife to be pressed, and getting out his surgical
+case, as he had once before in the Pension Schwarz, he sewed a button
+on his overcoat, using the curved needle and the catgut and working with
+surgeon's precision. Then, still working very carefully, he trimmed the
+edges of graying hair over his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best
+silk tie, now almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not
+coming, he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy's room to feed
+the mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with his face
+working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside table.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his defeat
+and approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them. Then he decided
+against this palpable appeal for sympathy, elected to go empty-handed
+and discover merely how comfortable she was or was not. When the time
+came he would slip out of her life, sending her a letter and leaving
+McLean on guard.
+
+Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase--where Harmony
+had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down to his
+death--climbed steadily, but without his usual elasticity. The place
+appalled him--its gloom, its dinginess, its somber quiet. In the
+daylight, with the pigeons on the sills and the morning sunlight
+printing the cross of the church steeple on the whitewashed wall, it was
+peaceful, cloisterlike, with landings that were crypts. But at night it
+was almost terrifying, that staircase.
+
+Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper landing,
+playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He waited outside
+before ringing, heard her begin something determinedly cheerful, falter,
+cease altogether. Peter rang.
+
+Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps--oh, certainly she had expected
+him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how she was getting
+on, how she was housed. She held out her hand and Peter took it. Still
+no words, only a half smile from her and no smile at all from Peter, but
+his heart in his eyes.
+
+“I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room.”
+
+“You knew I would come,” said Peter. “The reception room?”
+
+“Where customers wait.” She still carried her violin, and slipped back
+to her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its
+meagerness. He drew a long breath.
+
+Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen knitting a
+stocking. The reception room was warm from the day's fire, and in order.
+All the pins and scraps of the day had been swept up, and the portieres
+that made fitting-rooms of the corners were pushed back. Peter saw
+only a big room with empty corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were
+Harmony's.
+
+He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet settee. They
+were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first time. In the squalor
+of the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable intimacies of the Street of
+Seven Stars, they had been easy, unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was
+tongue-tied. Only one thing in him clamored for utterance, and that he
+sternly silenced.
+
+“I--I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?”
+
+“No. Of course, I understood.”
+
+“You were not angry?”
+
+“Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I needed
+you. Only, of course,--”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“I'll not say that, I think.”
+
+“Please say it, Peter!”
+
+Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.
+
+“Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me, only--”
+
+“Only--I always need you!” Peter, Peter!
+
+“Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs a
+woman; but--”
+
+“Well, of course--but--I'm generally in trouble, Harry dear.”
+
+Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of his
+weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by stooping for a
+neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had stuck it in his lapel he
+had saved his mental forces from the rout of Harmony's eyes.
+
+His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most
+delectable look in the aforesaid eyes.
+
+“I didn't come to be silly,” he said to the table. “I hate people who
+whine, and I've got into a damnable habit of being sorry for myself!
+It's to laugh, isn't it, a great, hulking carcass like me, to be--”
+
+“Peter,” said Harmony softly, “aren't you going to look at me?”
+
+“I'm afraid.”
+
+“That's cowardice. And I've fixed my hair a new way. Do you like it?”
+
+“Splendid,” said Peter to the center table.
+
+“You didn't look!”
+
+The rout of Harmony's eyes was supplemented by the rout of Harmony's
+hair. Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony was half
+exasperated; she would have boxed Peter's ears with a tender hand had
+she dared.
+
+His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced her at
+last.
+
+“First of all,” he said, “I am going back to America, Harmony. I've
+got all I can get here, all I came for--” He stopped, seeing her face.
+“Well, of course, that's not true, I haven't. But I'm going back,
+anyhow. You needn't look so stricken: I haven't lost my chance. I'll
+come back sometime again and finish, when I've earned enough to do it.”
+
+“You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money on
+others, and now you are going back just where you were, and--you are
+leaving me here alone!”
+
+“You are alone, anyhow,” said Peter, “making your own way and getting
+along. And McLean will be here.”
+
+“Are you turning me over to him?”
+
+No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.
+
+“Peter!”
+
+“Yes, dear?”
+
+“Do you remember the night in Anna's room at the Schwartz when you
+proposed to me?”
+
+No reply. Peter found another pin.
+
+“And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?”
+
+Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young figure,
+her luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.
+
+“Peter, I want you to--to ask me again.”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Now, listen to me, Harmony. You're sorry for me, that's all; I don't
+want to be pitied. You stay here and work. You'll do big things. I had a
+talk with the master while I was searching for you, and he says you
+can do anything. But he looked at me--and a sight I was with worry and
+fright--and he warned me off, Harmony. He says you must not marry.”
+
+“Old pig!” said Harmony. “I will marry if I please.”
+
+Nevertheless Peter's refusal and the master's speech had told somewhat.
+She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood close, looking
+down at her.
+
+“I've said a lot I didn't mean to,” he said. “There's only one thing I
+haven't said, I oughtn't to say it, dear. I'm not going to marry you--I
+won't have such a thing on my conscience. But it doesn't hurt a woman
+to know that a man loves her. I love you, dear. You're my heaven and my
+earth--even my God, I'm afraid. But I will not marry you.”
+
+“Not even if I ask you to?”
+
+“Not even then, dear. To share my struggle--”
+
+“I see,” slowly. “It is to be a struggle?”
+
+“A hard fight, Harmony. I'm a pauper practically.”
+
+“And what am I?”
+
+“Two poverties don't make a wealth, even of happiness,” said Peter
+steadily. “In the time to come, when you would think of what you might
+have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me, dear.”
+
+“People have married, women have married and carried on their work, too,
+Peter.”
+
+“Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of man,
+Harry. I'm jealous--jealous of every one about you. It would have to be
+the music or me.”
+
+“And you make the choice!” said Harmony proudly. “Very well, Peter, I
+shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious sort of love.”
+
+“I wonder,” Peter cried, “if you realize what love it is that loves you
+enough to give you up.”
+
+“You have not asked me if I care, Peter.”
+
+Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very
+beautiful.
+
+“I'm afraid to ask,” said Peter, and picking up his hat he made for the
+door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.
+
+“My sweetest heart!” he cried, and took her in his hungry arms. But even
+then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her slender body held
+to him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to her soft throat, Peter put
+her from him as a starving man might put away food.
+
+He held her off and looked at her.
+
+“I'm a fool and a weakling,” he said gravely. “I love you so much that I
+would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my girl! As long as I
+live I shall carry your image in my heart.”
+
+Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death that
+waited down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her again, put
+away her detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went to the door.
+
+“Good-bye, Harmony,” he said steadily. “Always in my heart!”
+
+Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America, with
+the recording angel opening a new page in life's ledger for her and
+a red-ink line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his daddy wandering
+through the heaven of friendly adventure and green fields, hand in hand;
+with the carrier resting after its labors in the pigeon house by the
+rose-fields of Sofia; with the sentry casting martial shadows through
+the barred windows of the hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to
+die, dividing his heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young
+girl.
+
+Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining into
+the salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter's open trunk and shabby
+wardrobe spread over chairs. An end of trunks and departure, as was the
+beginning.
+
+Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God's acre, whence little Jimmy had
+started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on the frost-covered
+grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle of the Donau. Harmony had
+taken her problem there, in the early hour before Monia would summon her
+to labor--took her problem and found her answer.
+
+The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too warmly
+clad, walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper against the
+cold. Already the air carried a hint of spring; there was a feeling of
+resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt alive under-foot.
+
+Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child had
+repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it, with some
+vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the little verse:--
+
+“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes:
+And in the hereafter, angels may Roll the stone from its grave away.”
+
+When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.
+
+There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great bunch
+of roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence they came. One
+of the pickaninnies had carried the box and stood impassively by, gazing
+at Harmony.
+
+Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered it, quite
+eclipsed Harmony's.
+
+“I come here every morning,” she said simply.
+
+She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the city.
+Her quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked once into the
+woman's eyes. After that she knew. It was on the drive back, with the
+little darky on the box beside the driver, that Harmony got her answer.
+
+Le Grande put a hand over Harmony's.
+
+“I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him.”
+
+“We loved him.”
+
+“And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right--I was not a fit person
+to--to have him.”
+
+“It was not that--not only that--”
+
+“Did he ever ask for me? But of course not.”
+
+“No, he had no remembrance.”
+
+Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.
+
+“I loved him very much when he came,” said Le Grande, “although I did
+not want him. I had been told I could have a career on the stage. Ah,
+my dear, I chose the career--and look at me! What have I? A grave in
+the cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by a man I loathe! If I
+could live it over again!”
+
+The answer was very close now:--
+
+“Would you stay at home?”
+
+“Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the boy
+always. There is only one thing worth while--the love of a good man. I
+have lived, lived hard. And I know.”
+
+“But supposing that one has real ability--I mean some achievement
+already, and a promise--”
+
+Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.
+
+“I see. You are a musician, I believe?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And--it is Dr. Byrne?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Le Grande bent forward earnestly.
+
+“My child,” she said, “if one man in all the world looked at me as your
+doctor looks at you, I--I would be a better woman.”
+
+“And my music?”
+
+“Play for your children, as you played for my little boy.”
+
+Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting clean
+collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like negligible garments
+with great care and putting in his dresscoat in a roll. His pipes took
+time, and the wooden sentry he packed with great care and a bit of
+healthy emotion. Once or twice he came across trifles of Harmony's, and
+he put them carefully aside--the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief,
+a bow she had worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before
+and that reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get away
+if he is to keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon bow can
+bring that look of suffering into his eyes.
+
+The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot, any foot
+at all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.
+
+“Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen,” he sang at the top of his
+voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the air. The
+antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in his bedroom.
+When the wildgame seller came over for coffee there would be a
+discussion probably. But were not the antlers of all deer similar?
+
+The Portier's wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her hand.
+
+“A cab,” she announced, “with a devil's imp on the box. Perhaps it is
+that American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!”
+
+It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache. Harmony
+was at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week before or the
+undecided and troubled girl of before that. A radiant Harmony, this, who
+stood in the doorway, who wished them good-morning, and ran up the old
+staircase with glowing eyes and a heart that leaped and throbbed. A
+woman now, this Harmony, one who had looked on life and learned; one
+who had chosen her fate and was running to meet it; one who feared only
+death, not life or anything that life could offer.
+
+The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up--not dressed. What did
+that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?
+
+Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney's Point, had come across a bit
+of paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his open trunk,
+staring blindly at it:--
+
+“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+“H. W.”
+
+Quite the end now, with Harmony running across the room and dropping
+down on her knees among a riot of garments--down on her knees, with one
+arm round Peter's neck, drawing his tired head lower until she could
+kiss him.
+
+“Oh, Peter, Peter, dear!” she cried. “I'll love you all my life if only
+you'll love me, and never, never let me go!”
+
+Peter was dazed at first. He put his arms about her rather unsteadily,
+because he had given her up and had expected to go through the rest of
+life empty of arm and heart. And when one has one's arms set, as one may
+say, for loneliness and relinquishment it is rather difficult--Ah, but
+Peter got the way of it swiftly.
+
+“Always,” he said incoherently; “forever the two of us. Whatever comes,
+Harmony?”
+
+“Whatever comes.”
+
+“And you'll not be sorry?”
+
+“Not if you love me.”
+
+Peter kissed her on the eyes very solemnly.
+
+“God helping me, I'll be good to you always. And I'll always love you.”
+
+He tried to hold her away from him for a moment after that, to tell her
+what she was doing, what she was giving up. She would not be reasoned
+with.
+
+“I love you,” was her answer to every line. And it was no divided
+allegiance she promised him. “Career? I shall have a career. Yours!”
+
+“And your music?”
+
+She colored, held him closer.
+
+“Some day,” she whispered, “I shall tell you about that.”
+
+Late winter morning in Vienna, with the school-children hurrying home,
+the Alserstrasse alive with humanity--soldiers and chimney-sweeps,
+housewives and beggars. Before the hospital the crowd lines up along the
+curb; the head waiter from the coffee-house across comes to the doorway
+and looks out. The sentry in front of the hospital ceases pacing and
+stands at attention.
+
+In the street a small procession comes at the double quick--a handful of
+troopers, a black van with tiny, high-barred windows, more troopers.
+
+Inside the van a Bulgarian spy going out to death--a swarthy little man
+with black eyes and short, thick hands, going out like a gentleman and a
+soldier to meet the God of patriots and lovers.
+
+The sentry, who was only a soldier from Salzburg with one lung, was also
+a gentleman and a patriot. He uncovered his head.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1214-0.txt or 1214-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/1/1214/
+
+Produced by Michael Delaney
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/1214-0.zip b/old/1214-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..70c23b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1214-0.zip
diff --git a/old/1214-h.zip b/old/1214-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6875e96
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1214-h.zip
diff --git a/old/1214-h/1214-h.htm b/old/1214-h/1214-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0b8e868
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1214-h/1214-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,12209 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Street of Seven Stars
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Release Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1214]
+Last Updated: March 9, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Delaney, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER XXVII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been a
+      garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game
+      preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the
+      building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something royal in
+      the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the great
+      glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling was
+      mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great
+      empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to
+      anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
+      related not a few herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside in
+      the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the heavy
+      barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named Scatchett
+      and dubbed &ldquo;Scatch&rdquo;&mdash;the gate slammed to and fro monotonously, giving
+      now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched itself, a
+      hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of
+      enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto, it
+      had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light if
+      not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a
+      gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of
+      the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a
+      crumpled napkin or two,&mdash;there were never enough to go round,&mdash;and
+      on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned for the things
+      of the flesh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with the
+      slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft under
+      the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old floor. At
+      the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled near the tile
+      stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no impatience,
+      however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put them together
+      carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of the grand piano,
+      anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from the stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was very bare&mdash;a long mirror between two of the windows,
+      half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano.
+      There were no rugs&mdash;the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners
+      and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
+      stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
+      under her fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
+      armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance
+      of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could
+      reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that the
+      girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed the
+      fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let the
+      initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had been
+      made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what; and it
+      revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of trunks. The
+      girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and looked at the
+      trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A door slammed
+      down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into one of those
+      receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she rubbed a
+      chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells, a
+      tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite &ldquo;Arlesienne&rdquo; will
+      serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
+      &ldquo;Siegfried&rdquo; will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more than
+      once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of early
+      rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with stiffened
+      fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a stove, and
+      sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once pink
+      butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls, and
+      honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in the
+      salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves and
+      holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down the
+      stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped
+      to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might
+      practice peacefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
+      from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
+      listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he
+      shook his fist up the stone staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gott im Himmel!&rdquo; he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of his
+      mustache bandage, &ldquo;what a people, these Americans! So much noise and no
+      music!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And mad!&rdquo; grumbled his wife. &ldquo;All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
+      night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going back
+      to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch was
+      returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her head
+      much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters had
+      gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds were
+      very low with all of them. The &ldquo;Bitte zum speisen&rdquo; of the little German
+      maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of beef and
+      carrots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
+      never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days&mdash;a
+      fruitcake from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or
+      twice on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth
+      it. Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness,
+      and a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh,
+      yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and the
+      faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all had
+      always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad&mdash;the
+      expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the
+      contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in one's
+      mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after nine months
+      of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or&mdash;and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
+      soul&mdash;to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
+      undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony stood
+      on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was calling down
+      the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scatch,&rdquo; she was shouting briskly, &ldquo;where is my hairbrush?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't you got a
+      comb?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the teeth are
+      out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look under the bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is,&rdquo; she called joyously. &ldquo;And here are Harmony's bedroom
+      slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!&rdquo; The girl got down off the
+      chair and went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks, dear,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm coming in a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa, and
+      looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the window
+      the air would brighten them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano's room.
+      She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her shabby
+      wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were no
+      footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to the Big
+      Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and held out her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Under my bed! Ten kronen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and ponderously
+      getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the dusty floor
+      beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on which she
+      pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the candle flame
+      and sat solemnly puffing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first for a week,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there
+      may be another relic of my prosperous days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a
+      government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen
+      piece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the other?&rdquo; she asked in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In my powder-box.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every little bit,&rdquo; she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, &ldquo;added to
+      what she's got, makes just a little bit more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it, it's
+      good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without losing
+      it now. I'll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New York&mdash;I
+      haven't even a dollar for tips.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;New York!&rdquo; said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. &ldquo;If Henry meets
+      me I know he will&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut!&rdquo; The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. &ldquo;You and
+      your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young mind
+      that money isn't the only thing Harmony is going to need? She's going to
+      be alone&mdash;and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not like
+      us. You have your Henry. I'm a beefy person who has a stomach, and I'm
+      thankful for it. But she is different&mdash;she's got the thing that you
+      are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to fight
+      in a church choir instead of grand opera.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Temperament?&rdquo; she asked. It had always been accepted in the little colony
+      that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser firmament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Big Soprano sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you like,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to
+      have souls, Scatchy, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was coming down
+      the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought, under her pillow,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;She'll find it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame of
+      a candle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having
+      seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back
+      alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were gone
+      now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little
+      Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry's arms about her,
+      had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears of
+      paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets were
+      still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense
+      of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming
+      gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place at
+      best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door, eyes
+      and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure had
+      stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment the
+      gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his
+      mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented when he
+      smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early morning
+      practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he cherished a
+      hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was for her he
+      wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day&mdash;hopefully! One must be
+      ready!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the
+      five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece of
+      his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a
+      gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bitte, Fraulein!&rdquo; he said through the bandage. &ldquo;It is for me a pleasure
+      to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over his
+      hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to Harmony that
+      lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could not but she
+      held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in his best
+      manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the stone
+      staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her with
+      his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting to
+      Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out into
+      the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the shadows,
+      and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when&mdash;having picked up her violin in a very passion of
+      loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds
+      echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms&mdash;it was when she
+      was ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl
+      from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having
+      adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the
+      gifted:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am
+      honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if
+      you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this
+      pleasure. Harry, you have it&mdash;the real thing, you know, whatever it
+      is&mdash;and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To
+      go now, just when lessons would mean everything&mdash;well, you must not
+      think of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us,
+      or at least&mdash;well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by
+      being careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but it may
+      help. Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and it may be yours
+      anyhow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things about our
+      leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You are so beautiful,
+      Harry,&mdash;although you never let us tell you so. And Sadie says you
+      have a soul and I haven't, and that souls are deadly things to have. I
+      feel to-night that in urging you to stay I am taking the burden of your
+      soul on me! Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you
+      call a policeman. And be sure you get into a respectable pension. There
+      are queer ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from home&mdash;you
+      said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?&mdash;and will keep this
+      as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go wrong&mdash;. But
+      perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any case, of course it's a loan, and
+      you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours by sending it back
+      when you get to work to make your fortune. And if you are doubtful at all,
+      just remember that hopeful little mother of yours who sent you over to get
+      what she had never been able to have for herself, and who planned this for
+      you from the time you were a kiddy and she named you Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SCATCH.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson
+      feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in the
+      draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony fought
+      her battle. And a battle it was. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had not known
+      everything. There had been no insurance on her father's life; the little
+      mother was penniless. A married sister would care for her, but what then?
+      Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to take her home, and
+      she had&mdash;the hoard under the pillow. To go back and teach the violin;
+      or to stay and finish under the master, be presented, as he had promised
+      her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the prestige at home that
+      that would mean, and its resulting possibility of fame and fortune&mdash;which?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she could teach
+      English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some of the stores
+      advertised &ldquo;English Spoken.&rdquo; That would be something to fall back on, a
+      clerkship during the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the
+      Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and
+      comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with
+      most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which
+      reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather
+      frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet under
+      her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out into the
+      cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall and listened.
+      She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the barcarolle from the
+      &ldquo;Tales&rdquo; of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in his night attire, his
+      chest open to the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor
+      above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly.
+      His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand. She eyed
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So! It is the American Fraulein now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music.&rdquo; He
+      fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one
+      eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She leaves to-day,&rdquo; she announced, ignoring the knot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? She is alone. Rosa says&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She leaves to-day!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth compactness.
+      The Portier jerked at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I last
+      night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair after her!
+      A man in the gateway!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage, which had
+      slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will stay if she so desire,&rdquo; he muttered furiously, and, raising the
+      knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and sweetly
+      up-curled, stood revealed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will stay!&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;And when you see men at the gate, let me
+      know. She is an angel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from
+      telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one's heart.
+      Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day&mdash;Himmel, the girl
+      must go!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and expensive;
+      Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere a tiny room with
+      board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly to practice with
+      stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not annoy people, that
+      was important.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa
+      wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it
+      was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city&mdash;young
+      girls of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she
+      could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went down to
+      interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the owner for
+      the old house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He looked
+      past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that the lease was up
+      and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight she was not so like the
+      angel, and after all she could only play the violin. The angel had a
+      voice, such a voice! And besides, there was an eye at the crack of the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a heavy heart
+      that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper quarters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
+      cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the gutters were
+      frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in the mountains the day
+      before and hanging from a hook before a wild-game shop, was frozen quite
+      stiff. It was a pretty creature. The girl turned her eyes away. A young
+      man, buying cheese and tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's an American girl, isn't it?&rdquo; he asked in American-German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him, and Rosa
+      talked. When the American left the shop he knew everything of Harmony that
+      Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called her &ldquo;The Beautiful One.&rdquo; Also he
+      was short one krone four beliers in his change, which is readily done when
+      a customer is plainly thinking of a &ldquo;beautiful one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a stove and no
+      objection to practicing. There were plenty&mdash;but the rates! The willow
+      plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of making the plainest garments
+      appear costly. Landladies looked at the plume and the suit and heard the
+      soft swish of silk beneath, which marks only self-respect in the American
+      woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their regular terms
+      until poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then at last toward
+      evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the corner of the
+      Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing, and the
+      landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for earache,
+      Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the center,
+      and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear higher than the
+      other and twisted one's nose. But there was an odor of stewing cabbage in
+      the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many previous stewed cabbages,
+      and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco. Harmony had had no lunch; she
+      turned rather faint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity of
+      the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or twice.
+      At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her eyes
+      closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a cheese
+      and some tinned fish under his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not ill, are you?&rdquo; he asked in English, and then remembering. &ldquo;Bist du
+      krank?&rdquo; He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity
+      of the &ldquo;du.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only tired,&rdquo; she said in English. &ldquo;And the odor of cabbage&mdash;&ldquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand. He
+      whistled softly. He had recognized her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cabbage, of course!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The pension upstairs is full of it. I live
+      there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served up with pork.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So bad,&rdquo; he observed, &ldquo;that I keep body and soul together by buying
+      strong and odorous food at the delicatessens&mdash;odorous, because only
+      rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only
+      thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese
+      has retired defeated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't like cheese.&rdquo; In sheer relief from the loneliness of the day
+      her spirits were rising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I
+      say&mdash;&rdquo; He hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you&mdash;don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It sounds attractive,&rdquo;&mdash;uncertainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see this
+      brisk young American&mdash;young, she knew by his voice, tall by his
+      silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could not see his
+      face, but she liked his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean&mdash;with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
+      legitimate friends in need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure it is not proper, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for professional
+      services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced to-night by the
+      landlady? Come now&mdash;to the coffee-house and the Paris edition of the
+      'Herald'!&rdquo; But the next moment he paused and ran his hand over his chin.
+      &ldquo;I'm pretty disreputable,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;I have been in a clinic all day,
+      and, hang it all, I'm not shaved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What difference does that make?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear young lady,&rdquo; he explained gravely, picking up the cheese and the
+      tinned fish, &ldquo;it makes a difference in me that I wish you to realize
+      before you see me in a strong light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rapped at the Portier's door, with the intention of leaving his parcels
+      there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his arm. A moment later
+      Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a bit excited, and lovely with
+      the color the adventure brought into her face. Her companion walked beside
+      her, tall, slightly stooped. She essayed a fugitive little side-glance up
+      at him, and meeting his eyes hastily averted hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the girl's mind
+      little Scatchett's letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you, call a
+      policeman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were gathered
+      miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly men&mdash;uniformed
+      officers, who made of the neighborhood coffee-house a sort of club, where
+      under their breath they criticized the Government and retailed small
+      regimental gossip; professors from the university, still wearing under the
+      beards of middle life the fine horizontal scars of student days; elderly
+      doctors from the general hospital across the street; even a Hofrath or
+      two, drinking beer and reading the &ldquo;Fliegende Blaetter&rdquo; and
+      &ldquo;Simplicissimus&rdquo;; and in an alcove round a billiard table a group of noisy
+      Korps students. Over all a permeating odor of coffee, strong black coffee,
+      made with a fig or two to give it color. It rose even above the blue
+      tobacco haze and dominated the atmosphere with its spicy and stimulating
+      richness. A bustle of waiters, a hum of conversation, the rattle of
+      newspapers and the click of billiard balls&mdash;this was the
+      coffee-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony had been
+      a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American integrity, in spite of
+      the salon of Maria Theresa and three expensive lessons a week in German.
+      Harmony knew the art galleries and the churches, which were free, and the
+      opera, thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone of Austrian
+      life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and disappeared
+      for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of the &ldquo;Herald.&rdquo; The
+      girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the bright electric lights, he
+      was not handsome, hardly good-looking. His mouth was wide, his nose
+      irregular, his hair a nondescript brown,&mdash;but the mouth had humor,
+      the nose character, and, thank Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that
+      Harmony saw all this at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables,
+      with a nod here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect&mdash;a
+      tall man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall men
+      are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the points
+      of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak to him. The
+      shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly the revelation was an
+      easement to the girl's nervousness. This smiling and unpressed individual,
+      blithely waving aloft the Paris edition of the &ldquo;Herald&rdquo; and equally
+      blithely ignoring the maledictions of the student from whom he had taken
+      it&mdash;even Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or threatened
+      him with the police.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to interfere
+      with her outlook over the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Warmer?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They know me
+      here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest cakes for me.
+      Don't let me bother you; go on and read. See which of the smart set is
+      getting a divorce&mdash;or is it always the same one? And who's President
+      back home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take back to
+      America with me&mdash;one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local
+      color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's wife to sit in the
+      cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll grow wealthy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what about the medical practice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous
+      promise of his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, it will work out perfectly,&rdquo; he said whimsically. &ldquo;The great
+      American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the feeble
+      American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office across
+      the street!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation
+      until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her
+      with comfortable satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nod your head but don't speak,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Remember, I am prescribing, and
+      there's to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or shall I
+      not open the cheese?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something
+      inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional
+      swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the
+      paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded
+      room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on
+      Harmony's lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes
+      that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to shift
+      his gaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the
+      unknown protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The function of a coffee-house,&rdquo; he explained gravely, &ldquo;is twofold.
+      Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I converse very badly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that well.
+      Shall I commence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why choke over
+      conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It was warm there, with
+      the heater at her back; better than the little room with the sagging bed
+      and the doors covered with wall paper. Her feet had stopped aching, too,
+      She could have sat there for hours. And&mdash;why evade it?&mdash;she was
+      interested. This whimsical and respectful young man with his absurd talk
+      and his shabby clothes had roused her curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please,&rdquo; she assented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, first of all, my name. I'm getting that over early, because it
+      isn't much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don't shudder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly I'm not shuddering.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a German
+      uncle of my mother's. Augustus! It's rather a mess. What shall I put on my
+      professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus Byrne nobody's fooled. They
+      know my wretched first name is Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or Patrick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather like Patrick&mdash;if I thought it might pass as Patrick!
+      Patrick has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that's not bad. But
+      Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; Harmony confessed half shyly, &ldquo;I like Peter as a name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as Peter Byrne.
+      The rest doesn't amount to much, but I want you to know it, since you have
+      been good enough to accept me on faith. I'm here alone, from a little town
+      in eastern Ohio; worked my way through a coeducational college in the West
+      and escaped unmarried; did two years in a drygoods store until, by saving
+      and working in my vacations, I got through medical college and tried
+      general practice. Didn't like it&mdash;always wanted to do surgery. A
+      little legacy from the German uncle, trying to atone for the 'Augustus,'
+      gave me enough money to come here. I've got a chance with the Days&mdash;surgeons,
+      you know&mdash;when I go back, if I can hang on long enough. That's all.
+      Here's a traveler's check with my name on it, to vouch for the truth of
+      this thrilling narrative. Gaze on it with awe; there are only a few of
+      them left!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as the strings
+      of her own violin, and under the even lightness of his tone she felt many
+      things that met a response in her&mdash;loneliness and struggle, and the
+      ever-present anxiety about money, grim determination, hope and fear, and
+      even occasional despair. He was still young, but there were lines in his
+      face and a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less frank, she
+      would have known soon enough&mdash;the dingy little pension, the shabby
+      clothes&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you for telling me,&rdquo; she said simply. &ldquo;I think I understand very
+      well because&mdash;it's music with me: violin. And my friends have gone,
+      so I am alone, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd without
+      seeing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's curious, isn't it?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Here we are, you and I, meeting in the
+      center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief, both working our heads off
+      for an idea that may never pan out! Why aren't you at home to-night,
+      eating a civilized beefsteak and running upstairs to get ready for a nice
+      young man to bring you a box of chocolates? Why am I not measuring out
+      calico in Shipley &amp; West's? Instead, we are going to Frau Schwarz', to
+      listen to cold ham and scorched compote eaten in six different languages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She was drawing
+      on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then, seeing Byrne,
+      he waved a greeting to him. Byrne's eyes, from being introspective, became
+      watchful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with black hair
+      and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He was not alone. A
+      slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic, rose when he did and threw
+      away the end of a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do we go so soon?&rdquo; she demanded fretfully in German. &ldquo;It is early
+      still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and eminently
+      satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke the other's
+      language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because, my beloved,&rdquo; he said lightly, &ldquo;you are smoking a great many
+      poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to speak to Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is that with Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a woman at
+      last!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with a slow
+      and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed him, and paused
+      to apologize, to the officer's delight and her escort's irritation. And
+      Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line of annoyance between his brows. The
+      girl was ahead; that complicated things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily, with a word
+      of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done. He had taken the
+      little Austrian's arm and led her by the table while he was still greeting
+      her. He held her in conversation in his absurd German until they had
+      reached the swinging doors, while her companion followed helplessly. And
+      he bowed her out, protesting his undying admiration for her eyes, while
+      the florid youth alternately raged behind him and stared back at Harmony,
+      interested and unconscious behind her table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned, unsmiling, to
+      the other man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That won't do, you know, Stewart,&rdquo; he said, grave but not unfriendly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Kid wouldn't bite her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll not argue about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not,&rdquo; he agreed cheerfully. &ldquo;That is up to you, of course. I
+      didn't know. We're looking for you to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne, but the
+      situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll be round,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have a lecture and I may be late, but I'll
+      come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Kid&rdquo; was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air,
+      angrily flushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You saw!&rdquo; she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand
+      through her arm. &ldquo;He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before I
+      knew you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before you knew me, little one,&rdquo; he said cheerfully, &ldquo;you were exactly
+      what you are now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused on the curb and raised her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So! And what is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beautiful as the stars, only&mdash;not so remote.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The
+      &ldquo;beautiful&rdquo; calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her
+      suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remote? What is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking of Worthington.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of soldiers
+      trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement and dodged
+      verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He drew his chin
+      into the up-turned collar of his overcoat and waited, an absurdly patient
+      figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided into a rain of tears.
+      Then he took the girl's elbow again and led her, childishly weeping, into
+      a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and eyes of the Alserstrasse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was
+      closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or of
+      his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather puzzled
+      at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation. He had
+      suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller's
+      narrative of Rosa's account of the disrupted colony across in the old
+      lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the dark
+      entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright light of the
+      coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the emotional
+      coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God save the
+      mark!&mdash;her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted it:
+      his responsibility, if you please.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly well&mdash;enough to
+      love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and
+      passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them,
+      or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament; the
+      all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher than
+      others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt Theater,
+      where he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had known in
+      Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking her own
+      meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater she had worn
+      a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its years of
+      coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's new resolution that
+      night: this poverty adopting poverty, this youth adopting youth, with the
+      altruistic purpose of saving it from itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story or knew
+      her name, Rosa having called her &ldquo;The Beautiful One&rdquo; in her narrative, and
+      the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Back to &ldquo;The Beautiful One&rdquo; went Peter Byrne, and, true to his new part of
+      protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and tried to look much older
+      than he really was, and responsible. The result was a grimness that
+      alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten proprieties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I must go,&rdquo; she said hurriedly, after a glance at his
+      determinedly altruistic profile. &ldquo;I must finish packing my things. The
+      Portier has promised&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go! Why, you haven't even told me your name!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frau Schwarz will present you to-night,&rdquo; primly and rising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne rose, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely yard
+      alone after dark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yard! How do you know that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set on the
+      heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of dissolution. It
+      took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally furnished an inspiration. He
+      indicated it airily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Saw you this morning coming out&mdash;delicatessen shop across the
+      street,&rdquo; he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty which the
+      girl's eyes seemed somehow to compel: &ldquo;That's true, but it's not all the
+      truth. I was on the bus last night, and when you got off alone I&mdash;I
+      saw you were an American, and that's not a good neighborhood. I took the
+      liberty of following you to your gate!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and said so. And
+      in her gratitude she made no objection to his suggestion that he see her
+      safely to the old lodge and help her carry her hand-luggage and her violin
+      to the pension. He paid the trifling score, and followed by many eyes in
+      the room they went out into the crisp night together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of scrubbing
+      showed that the Portier's wife was preparing for the inspection of
+      possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the stairs by the light of a
+      candle, and the steam of the hot water on the cold marble invested her
+      like an aura. She stood aside to let them pass, and then went cumbrously
+      down the stairs to where, a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other, the
+      Portier was frying chops for the evening meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I said?&rdquo; she demanded from the doorway. &ldquo;Your angel is here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you refuse,
+      because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is again here, and with
+      a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the way of the young and beautiful&mdash;there is always a man,&rdquo;
+       said the Portier, turning a chop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away,
+      exasperated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate,&rdquo; she threw back
+      over her shoulder. &ldquo;I knew it from the first; but you, great booby, can
+      see nothing but red lips. Bah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and freezing
+      cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter Byrne sat and
+      waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the Street of Seven Stars,
+      the arc lights swung in the wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz, much crimped
+      and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head of the long table.
+      There were few, almost no Americans, the Americans flocking to good food
+      at reckless prices in more fashionable pensions; to the Frau
+      Gallitzenstein's, for instance, in the Kochgasse, where there was to be
+      had real beefsteak, where turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and
+      Christmas, and where, were one so minded, one might revel in whipped
+      cream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the center of
+      the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with wire stems and green
+      paper leaves, and over the side-table, with its luxury of compote in tall
+      glass dishes and its wealth of small hard cakes, there hung a framed motto
+      which said, &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen,&rdquo; &ldquo;No Smoking,&rdquo;&mdash;and which looked
+      suspiciously as if it had once adorned a compartment of a railroad train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a careful
+      toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But he had gone
+      further: He had discovered, for the first time in the three months of its
+      defection, a button missing from his coat, and had set about to replace
+      it. He had cut a button from another coat, by the easy method of
+      amputating it with a surgical bistoury, and had sewed it in its new
+      position with a curved surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized
+      catgut. The operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with the
+      aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he tied the
+      ends in a surgeon's knot underneath and stood back to consider the result.
+      It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous. After a moment or two of troubled
+      thought he blacked the white catgut with a dot of ink and went on his way
+      rejoicing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the course he had
+      laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive line of thought as he
+      dressed. When he was not smoking he was whistling, and when he was doing
+      neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers, he was
+      swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The materials for
+      a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an obelisk in a
+      cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive, and hardly
+      necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open&mdash;one window, to
+      be exact, the room being very small&mdash;and spends most of the day in a
+      warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except
+      subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step by step,
+      the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon, weighing,
+      considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached as he brushed back
+      his hair and put away his sewing implements, was somewhat to the effect
+      that he could have done a better piece of work with his eyes shut and his
+      hands tied behind his back; and that if it were not for the wealth of
+      material to work on he'd pack up and go home. Which brought him back to
+      Harmony and his new responsibility. He took off the necktie he had
+      absently put on and hunted out a better one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was late at supper&mdash;an offense that brought a scowl from the head
+      of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile. Harmony was
+      already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish
+      student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of
+      language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to be
+      again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly, aware
+      of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did not
+      understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and failing
+      that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the day. Her
+      bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and rather aloof. She ate
+      almost nothing, and left the table before the others had finished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing eyes!
+      What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with dessert! What
+      heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted eyes, looking away
+      from appealing ones; lips that tremble with wretchedness nibbling daintily
+      at a morsel; smiles that sear; foolish bits of talk that mean nothing
+      except to one, and to that one everything! Harmony, freezing at Peter's
+      formal bow and gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the meal, or no
+      nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering the little
+      Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope of a glance. And
+      over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen&rdquo; sign, and an
+      acrimonious discussion on eugenics between an American woman doctor named
+      Gates and a German matron who had had fifteen children, and who reduced
+      every general statement to a personal insult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed, and she
+      was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one. Defiantly, too, had he
+      only known it, her small chin up and her color high again; playing the
+      &ldquo;Humoresque,&rdquo; of all things, in the hope, of course, that he would hear it
+      and guess from her choice the wild merriment of her mood. Peter rapped
+      once or twice, but obtained no answer, save that the &ldquo;Humoresque&rdquo; rose a
+      bit higher; and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he was forced
+      to light a cigarette to cover his pausing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman of forty
+      or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a masculine disregard of
+      clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let him help her into her ulster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;New girl, eh?&rdquo; she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door. &ldquo;Very gay,
+      isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that! Honestly, Peter, what
+      are we going to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better food, but
+      not for our terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put it on
+      with a single jerk down over her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, darn money, anyhow!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Come and walk to the corner with me.
+      I have a lecture.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his room. There,
+      on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he wrote&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you ill? Or have I done anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P. B.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the little
+      Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said nothing, nor did Peter,
+      who rose and dusted his knees. The little Bulgarian spoke no English and
+      little German. Between them was the wall of language. But higher than this
+      barrier was the understanding of their common sex. He held out his hand,
+      still smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took it. Then he followed
+      the woman doctor down the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be absurd.
+      She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts an
+      unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he had
+      offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his interest.
+      But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and intelligent
+      notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his enjoyment of the
+      Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed down its involved
+      German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not approve of
+      Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of
+      fineness in the man himself&mdash;an intangible thing that seems to be a
+      matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of
+      the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked to
+      Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise
+      combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that, and the recollection that
+      it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics, no
+      lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down and
+      that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was
+      whistling as he walked along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped under
+      a street light to consult his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almost ten!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie I
+      was going to your pension. She detests Stewart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make a good
+      woman understand that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God for that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the
+      &ldquo;Humoresque.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was to
+      be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights were
+      still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs and,
+      for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced as out
+      of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Out of order'!&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;Out of order since last spring, judging by
+      that card. Vorwarts!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer played
+      golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a
+      driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to forswear the
+      more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular development that
+      his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails, without an ounce of fat,
+      and he climbed the long steep flights with an elasticity that left even
+      Boyer a step or so behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat
+      replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with
+      smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the sound
+      of beer mugs on wood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men bowed
+      ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and bowing from
+      the waist. Byrne sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do I smell, Marie?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;Surely not sausages!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old
+      friend. It was always sausages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sausages, of a truth&mdash;fat ones.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But surely not with mustard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach, ja&mdash;englisch mustard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on
+      Byrne's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was very angry with you to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's unconventional
+      menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of addressing Marie in English,
+      while she replied in her own tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and you&mdash;She
+      is rich, so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know. I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And good?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking up
+      at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard.
+      Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She had
+      put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones were
+      small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was sad to-night,&rdquo; she said plaintively. &ldquo;I wished to jump out the
+      window.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I made you feel like that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not you&mdash;the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      stopped tragically, then sniffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sausages!&rdquo; she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the
+      kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in
+      Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could
+      teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of
+      clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing,
+      offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of
+      overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness of
+      the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies that
+      others may live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness
+      which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of
+      ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming
+      egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in
+      Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means at
+      his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne was
+      living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in winter,
+      starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury
+      of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water on tap,
+      and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with
+      premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been a
+      fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a
+      reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at the
+      same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub sizzled
+      if one touched it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom;
+      the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress,
+      which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again,
+      opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room,
+      now in chaotic disorder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men already
+      there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing
+      research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from
+      Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne stood
+      by waiting for the hand to be played.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority. It was a
+      regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat in
+      Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie's boiled Wiener sausages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers. MacLean,
+      who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in chips with quick
+      gestures of his long pianist's fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out, and so,
+      after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and fell to betting.
+      Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe, and after a second's
+      hesitation Byrne turned to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know just what to say, Stewart,&rdquo; he began in an undertone. &ldquo;I'm
+      sorry. I didn't want to hurt Marie, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that's all right.&rdquo; Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward to watch
+      the game with an air of ending the discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been kind to
+      me, and I like her. You know that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be an ass!&rdquo; Stewart turned on him sharply. &ldquo;Marie is a little fool,
+      that's all. I didn't know it was an American girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He stayed out of
+      the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about the room. He glanced
+      into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where Marie hovered over the stove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and saw him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come,&rdquo; she called. &ldquo;Watch the supper for me while I go down for more
+      beer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no,&rdquo; he replied, imitating her tone. &ldquo;Watch the supper for me while I
+      go down for more beer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love thee,&rdquo; she called merrily. &ldquo;Tell the Herr Doktor I love thee. And
+      here is the pitcher.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The
+      cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing
+      the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a
+      pinnacle of proprietorship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; he was saying, in reply to something gone before; &ldquo;I used to
+      come here Saturday nights&mdash;used to come early and take a bath.
+      Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit in a corner
+      and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp there, and decent food,
+      and a bed that didn't suffer from necrosis in the center. Then when he was
+      called home I took it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Girl and all, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she is. He
+      came back last fall on his wedding trip&mdash;he married a wealthy girl
+      and came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here. There was the deuce to
+      pay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jealous, eh?&rdquo; from Hunter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him&mdash;said he didn't
+      respect her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a curious code of honor,&rdquo; said Boyer thoughtfully. And indeed to
+      none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl of the streets,
+      driven by God knows what necessity to make her own code and, having made
+      it, living up to it with every fiber of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bitte zum speisen!&rdquo; called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and the men
+      trooped out to the kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in the
+      center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and above all
+      sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer, as did the others,
+      and sang German songs with a frightful accent and much vigor and
+      sentiment, as also did the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and told
+      himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like a prince for
+      the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the hollow center of his
+      bed, where his big figure fitted as comfortably as though it lay in a
+      washtub, and before his eyes there came a vision of Stewart's flat and the
+      slippers by the fire&mdash;which was eminently human.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with considerable
+      vigor, that he'd be damned if he would&mdash;which was eminently Peter
+      Byrne. Almost immediately, with the bed coverings, augmented by his
+      overcoat, drawn snug to his chin, and the better necktie swinging from the
+      gasjet in the air from the opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours
+      he had entirely forgotten Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the little
+      Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a shawl over her
+      shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire, while in the dining-room
+      the little chambermaid cut butter and divided it sparingly among a dozen
+      breakfast trays&mdash;on each tray two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate,
+      a cup. On two trays Olga, with a glance over her shoulder, placed two
+      butter pats. The mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a keen
+      eye for butter&mdash;and a hard heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Katrina came to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hot water is ready,&rdquo; she announced. &ldquo;And the coffee also. Hast thou
+      been to mass?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a lie.&rdquo; This quite on general principle, it being one of the
+      cook's small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her underling,
+      and one of Olga's Sunday morning's indulgences to oversleep and avoid the
+      mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and without reply, being occupied at
+      that moment in standing between Katrina and the extra pats of butter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the lie,&rdquo; said Katrina calmly, &ldquo;thou shalt have no butter this
+      morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it, wicked one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The new Fraulein is American?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Katrina shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall put more water to heat,&rdquo; she said resignedly. &ldquo;The Americans
+      use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood with it
+      poised in her thin young arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The new Fraulein is very beautiful,&rdquo; she continued aloud. &ldquo;Thinkest thou
+      it is the hot water?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?&rdquo; demanded Katrina. &ldquo;Go, and be
+      less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who rings, but the new
+      American.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony's door, and being bidden, entered. The
+      room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her nightgown, was closing
+      the outer casement. The inner still swung open. Olga, having put down her
+      pitcher, shivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always with open windows.&rdquo; Harmony having secured the inner casement, was
+      wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the faded butterflies.
+      Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh. She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the air of the night,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;it is full of mists and illnesses!
+      Will you have breakfast now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In ten minutes, after I have bathed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen, shaking her
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are strange, the Americans!&rdquo; she said to latrine. &ldquo;And if to be
+      lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had passed with
+      the reading of his note, and the sensation of his protection and nearness
+      had been almost physical. In the virginal little apartment in the lodge of
+      Maria Theresa the only masculine presence had been that of the Portier,
+      carrying up coals at ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the accompanist who
+      each alternate day had played for the Big Soprano to practice. And they
+      had felt no deprivation, except for those occasional times when Scatchy
+      developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a dancing-hall or one of
+      the little theaters that opened after the opera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman or
+      disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown herself on
+      the protection of this shabby big American whom she had met but once, and,
+      having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of course, that she realized her
+      dependence. She had felt very old and experienced and exceedingly
+      courageous as she put out her light the night before and took a flying
+      leap into the bed. She was still old and experienced, if a trifle less
+      courageous, that Sunday morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls, two pats of
+      butter&mdash;shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina the thrifty&mdash;and
+      a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper torn from a notebook:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company. Will you
+      walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to ask you, but am
+      spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one remaining American suit
+      is being pressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P. B.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H. W.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway told
+      Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her violin. The idea
+      of work obsessed her. To-morrow there would be the hunt for something to
+      do to supplement her resources, this afternoon she had rashly promised to
+      walk. The morning, then, must be given up to work. But after all she did
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused outside
+      her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter Byrne, listening while
+      he sorted lecture memoranda at his little table in bathrobe and slippers,
+      absently filed the little note with the others&mdash;where he came across
+      it months later&mdash;next to a lecture on McBurney's Point, and spent a
+      sad hour or so over it. Over all the sordid little pension, with its odors
+      of food and stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial flowers,
+      the music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her room across from Harmony's, Anna Gates was sewing, or preparing to
+      sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the room in violent
+      disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting savagely at a roll of pink
+      flannel. Because she was working with curved surgeon's scissors, borrowed
+      from Peter, the cut edges were strangely scalloped. Her method as well as
+      her tools was unique. Clearly she was intent on a body garment, for now
+      and then she picked up the flannel and held it to her. Having thus, as one
+      may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to cut again, jaw tight
+      set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a small replica of Peter Byrne
+      sewing a button on his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong. She rolled
+      up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner, and proceeded to her
+      Sunday morning occupation of putting away the garments she had worn during
+      the week, a vast and motley collection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the irritability of her mood Harmony's music had a late but certain
+      effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than usual, seeing that
+      she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly picked up the bundle from the
+      corner. She hunted about for a thimble, being certain she had brought one
+      from home a year before, but failed to find it. And finally, bundle under
+      her arm and smiling, she knocked at Harmony's door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you mind letting me sit with you?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I'll not stir. I
+      want to sew, and my room is such a mess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony threw the door wide. &ldquo;You will make me very happy, if only my
+      practicing does not disturb you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll probably be the disturbing element,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm a noisy sewer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor
+      immediately. She borrowed a thimble&mdash;not because she cared whether
+      she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the game&mdash;and
+      settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For an hour she
+      plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her bow and
+      turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in her
+      thread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's in the most damnable knot!&rdquo; she said, and Harmony was suddenly aware
+      that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please don't pay any attention to me,&rdquo; she implored. &ldquo;I hate to sew.
+      That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool about
+      music.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps, if you hate to sew&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate being
+      over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and clinics,
+      and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse and as ugly
+      as sin, and I hate never having had any children!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next
+      moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was
+      smiling up through her glasses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm really
+      weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad and I can't
+      afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own cooking, but
+      what time have I?&rdquo; She spread out the pieces of flannel on her knee. &ldquo;Does
+      this look like anything to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A petticoat, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't intend it as a petticoat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought, on account of the scallops&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scallops!&rdquo; Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from them
+      to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scallops!&rdquo; she gasped at last. &ldquo;Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting
+      'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately flushed,
+      repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little adroitnesses
+      to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to Peter&mdash;Peter's
+      future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his hair cut, Peter's
+      encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel Peter almost fought. It
+      developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had the choice of weapons,
+      and had chosen fists, and that the major had been carried away. Dr. Gates
+      grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back on the pink flannel. She
+      confided to Harmony that the various pieces, united, were to make a
+      dressing-gown for a little American boy at the hospital. &ldquo;Although,&rdquo; she
+      commented, &ldquo;it looks more like a chair cover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined with
+      a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the crooked
+      edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the mother
+      who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by
+      dint of skillful listening, which is always better than questioning, the
+      faded little woman doctor knew all the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was rather aghast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose you cannot find anything to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must,&rdquo; simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's such a terrible city for a girl alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not really alone. I know you now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And there is Peter Byrne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; Dr. Gates sniffed. &ldquo;Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any
+      comparison in destitution!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony stiffened a trifle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I do not mean money,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;There are such things as
+      encouragement, and&mdash;and friendliness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One cannot eat encouragement,&rdquo; retorted Dr. Gates sagely. &ldquo;And
+      friendliness between you and any man&mdash;bah! Even Peter is only human,
+      my dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure he is very good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I'm a
+      skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall in love with
+      him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't let him fall in love
+      with you. He probably will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare for
+      lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that a
+      headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised.
+      Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the
+      afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner she
+      repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for the
+      sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty. For
+      illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the spiritual,
+      the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of general practice,
+      had come to view life along physiological lines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best
+      tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To whom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment she
+      thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I said you were only
+      human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot imagine,&rdquo; said Peter slowly, &ldquo;the reason for any conversation
+      about me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it
+      always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then
+      she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody was
+      good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you warned her against me,&rdquo; said Peter grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make 'way
+      with myself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cui bono?&rdquo; demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. &ldquo;The mischief is
+      done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates looked up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm in love with you myself, Peter!&rdquo; she said gratefully. &ldquo;Perhaps it is
+      the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold
+      water that evening and obeyed little Olga's &ldquo;Bitte sum speisen.&rdquo; The
+      chairs round the dining-table were only half occupied&mdash;a free concert
+      had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly
+      considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of
+      the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room
+      far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what
+      he had learned during the week&mdash;his gleanings from near-by tables in
+      coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe,
+      where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met a
+      tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was
+      talking volubly&mdash;as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the
+      scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the girl.
+      Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of the
+      intimacy of the day before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not entirely. Somewhat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer
+      from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid of headache tablets.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what had
+      she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her physician.
+      That was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next time I shall send Olga.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as he
+      might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her
+      new-growing confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a cigarette&mdash;according
+      to the custom of the pension, which accorded the &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen&rdquo; sign the
+      same attention that it did to the portrait of the deceased Herr Schwarz&mdash;that
+      he turned to her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved
+      herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you do not prescribe air?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind my going
+      along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a swift glance
+      of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather exultant
+      himself; certainly he had been adroit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep,&rdquo; said Harmony, who
+      had missed the by-play. &ldquo;And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice companion,
+      I'm sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter had she
+      followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction mattering
+      little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking of
+      immaterial things&mdash;of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of
+      the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the
+      Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the Benk
+      sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting diplomacy
+      to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out what was in
+      his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you don't care a rap about spires. I don't believe
+      you know anything about them. I don't. What did that idiot of a woman
+      doctor say to you to-day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what you mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out with two
+      premises: I'm a man, and you're young and attractive. Then she draws some
+      sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see why we need discuss it,&rdquo; said poor Harmony. &ldquo;Or how you know&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she came to
+      me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to you or not, but&mdash;we'd
+      started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear girl, you are
+      beautiful and I know it. That's all the more reason why, if you'll stand
+      for it, you need some one to look after you&mdash;I'll not say like a
+      brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor brothers to
+      their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and who isn't
+      going to fall in love with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not. Besides, I&mdash;&rdquo; Here Peter Byrne had another
+      inspiration, not so good as the first&mdash;&ldquo;Besides, there is somebody at
+      home, you understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A girl at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A girl,&rdquo; said Peter, lying manfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How very nice!&rdquo; said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all
+      sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of
+      their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers and
+      street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to themselves.
+      Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked blissful
+      personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money&mdash;or its lack&mdash;their
+      ambitions, their hopes, even&mdash;and here was intimacy, indeed!&mdash;their
+      disappointments, their failures of courage, their occasional loss of faith
+      in themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward the
+      Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a chilly cold
+      that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of the Votivkirche
+      were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took on, against the
+      gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for an occasional
+      pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the streets were
+      deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl rejected his
+      offer of a taxicab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We should be home too quickly,&rdquo; she observed naively. &ldquo;And we have so
+      much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English lessons
+      in the afternoon and working all morning at my music&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely, his
+      head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what a
+      precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very slender
+      her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep into
+      his soul that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a
+      friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they
+      were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned in
+      at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided with
+      Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled
+      mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin heart
+      in his voice, the barcarolle from the &ldquo;Tales&rdquo; of Hoffmann. He saw Harmony,
+      and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would have
+      pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is only the Portier from the lodge,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note,
+      stood before Harmony, bowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad,&rdquo; he said thickly. &ldquo;There is no
+      more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has
+      only one lung.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But think!&rdquo; Harmony said in German. &ldquo;No more practicing in the early
+      dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is
+      better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and
+      bowed after them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gute Nacht,&rdquo; he called. &ldquo;Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the
+      salon and a bath of the finest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his
+      unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the
+      Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mind if I ask one question?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You honor me, madam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;what is the name of the girl back home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine
+      names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emma.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!&rdquo; But there was a touch of
+      disappointment in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the
+      master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a grain
+      of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had
+      been right&mdash;she had the real thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself to
+      an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the
+      anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his
+      rare enthusiasms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Six months,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and you will go back to your America and show them
+      how over here we teach violin. I will a letter&mdash;letters&mdash;give
+      you, and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my
+      pupil, is it not so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with
+      the praise and excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I can stay so long,&rdquo; she answered unsteadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished you
+      talk of going! Gott im Himmel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something
+      to do I shall have to go back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse his
+      ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He spent five
+      minutes in indignant protest, then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay. Perhaps
+      I can now and then find a concert for you.&rdquo; It was a lure he had thrown
+      out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being always eagerly
+      swallowed. &ldquo;And no more talk of going away. I refuse to allow. You shall
+      not go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was interested.
+      He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen is fifty Kronen,
+      and South American beef is high of price. He followed Harmony into the
+      outer room and bowed her out of his studio.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein has paid?&rdquo; he demanded, turning sharply to the lady
+      secretary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After the lesson?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja, Herr Professor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is better,&rdquo; said the master, &ldquo;that she pay hereafter before the
+      lesson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja, Herr Professor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's name.
+      There were many such crosses on the ledger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the morning,
+      hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment it was over.
+      He had lectures in the evenings, too, and although he lingered for an hour
+      or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken possession of by the
+      little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for things American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and
+      helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little
+      Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the
+      stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of the
+      man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid tread. The
+      two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals without speech
+      between them were rather for lack of understanding than for that
+      completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was the first
+      to speak after their greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marie all right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks. Does it matter which night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say Friday, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood
+      failed to notice it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wake up, Byrne!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You remember well enough. Neither the Days nor
+      any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you go on
+      living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double drain
+      there that tells on one&mdash;eating little and being eaten much. Those
+      old walls are full of vermin. Why don't you take our apartment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and Breidau can't
+      take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and we're going to
+      Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead enough to take a holiday. And
+      if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or less,
+      you can have it, and&mdash;a home, old man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted
+      him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, all right.&rdquo; Stewart was rather offended. &ldquo;I can't do more than give
+      you a chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of Sunday
+      had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday and Tuesday. The
+      sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and the
+      smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in
+      depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of
+      musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses
+      as they worked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his up-turned collar;
+      moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather than
+      precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a vision of the
+      little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the table, and the general
+      air of warmth and cheer, and a figure presiding over the brick stove in
+      the kitchen. Byrne shook himself like a great dog and turned in at the
+      gate of the hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned she
+      faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that
+      frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against barriers
+      of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far from
+      absolute cruelty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then, as the
+      pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen&mdash;also in advance,&mdash;went
+      on, recklessly. She played marvelously those days, crying out through her
+      violin the despair she had sealed her lips against. On Thursday, playing
+      for the master, she turned to find him flourishing his handkerchief, and
+      went home in a sort of daze, incredulous that she could have moved him to
+      tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up the
+      coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the chance of
+      seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe
+      Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle of
+      native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the little
+      Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was simmering in
+      those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But instead he had
+      kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray words, odd
+      glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind her ears. For
+      reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one of those
+      inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in troubled
+      Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher on the
+      fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that made even
+      that grim official smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically: so many
+      hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many afternoons
+      searching for something to do, making rounds of shops where her English
+      might be valuable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one
+      experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears in her
+      eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first interview, under
+      Peter's grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper was obviously suspicious
+      of Peter. After that, whenever he could escape from clinics, Peter went
+      along, but stayed outside, smoking his eternal cigarette, and keeping a
+      watchful eye on things inside the shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was not well,
+      from the girl's eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper's face, he had opened
+      the door in time to hear enough. He had lifted the proprietor bodily and
+      flung him with a crash into a glass showcase of ornaments for the hair.
+      Then, entirely cheerful and happy, and unmolested by the frightened
+      clerks, he led Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic triumph bought
+      her a bunch of valley lilies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very bad,
+      indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own
+      feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did a
+      quixotic thing&mdash;which was Peter, of course, all over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea came to him
+      there. Hardly came to him, being Marie's originally. The little flat was
+      cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened her kitchen, brought in a
+      waist she was making and sat sewing while the two men talked. Their
+      conversation was technical, a new extirpation of the thyroid gland, a
+      recent nephrectomy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She struggled with
+      the technicalities of their talk as she sewed, finding here and there a
+      comprehensive bit. At those times she sat, needle poised, intelligent eyes
+      on the speakers, until she lost herself again in the mazes of their
+      English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten o'clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her get the
+      stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening beer. He took
+      advantage of her absence to broach the matter of Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's up against it, as a matter of fact,&rdquo; he finished. &ldquo;It ought to be
+      easy enough for her to find something, but it isn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she's rather handsome,
+      isn't she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's one of the difficulties. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart smoked and reflected. &ldquo;No friends here at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could she teach violin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't there any kids in the American colony who want lessons? There's
+      usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any entertainments of
+      the Doctors' Club.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They don't want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I could put a
+      card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!&rdquo; cried Peter with a burst of
+      honest resentment, &ldquo;why do I have to be poor?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money, could you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he found in
+      his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was carefully filling the
+      mugs. &ldquo;Why do you not marry her?&rdquo; she asked unexpectedly. &ldquo;Then you could
+      take this flat. We are going to Semmering for the winter sports. I would
+      show her about the stove.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marry her, of course!&rdquo; said Peter gravely. &ldquo;Just pick her up and carry
+      her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to marry me need
+      have nothing to do with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but does she not wish it?&rdquo; demanded Marie. &ldquo;Are you so certain,
+      stupid big one? Do not women always love you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back to the
+      Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest, almost humble. It
+      had never occurred to him that women might care for him for himself. In
+      his struggling life there had been little time for women. But about
+      himself as the solution of a problem&mdash;that was different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the girl's being
+      willing, was Stewart right&mdash;could two people live as cheaply as one?
+      Marie was an Austrian and knew how to manage&mdash;that was different. And
+      another thing troubled him. He dreaded to disturb the delicate adjustment
+      of their relationship; the terra incognita of a young girl's mind daunted
+      him. There was another consideration which he put resolutely in the back
+      of his mind&mdash;his career. He had seen many a promising one killed by
+      early marriage, men driven to the hack work of the profession by the
+      scourge of financial necessity. But that was a matter of the future; the
+      necessity was immediate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered Schneeberg
+      drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress defended by the
+      elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized again. Peter Byrne
+      battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he fought he made his decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of
+      the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and
+      in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost ran
+      up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the key and
+      he swore under his breath. He slammed the door behind him. Peter always
+      slammed doors, and had an apologetic way of opening the door again and
+      closing it gently, as if to show that he could. Harmony's room was dark,
+      but he had surprised her once into a confession that when she was very
+      downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue indeed. So he
+      stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from Dr. Gates's room across
+      there came a hum of conversation. He knew at once that Harmony was there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand over his
+      hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries to a proposal of
+      marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in
+      deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and
+      pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still under way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Come in and get warm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round her
+      shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please go out!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I am not dressed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are covered,&rdquo; returned Anna Gates. &ldquo;That's all that any sort of
+      clothing can do. Don't mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed. Look out for
+      pins!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed door and
+      stared at Harmony&mdash;Harmony in the red light from the little open door
+      of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit of white petticoat;
+      Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and tied out of her eyes with an
+      encircling band of rosy flannel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do sit!&rdquo; cried Anna Gates. &ldquo;You fill the room so. Bless you, Peter, what
+      a collar!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve of
+      proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter, seated now
+      on the bed, writhed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rapped at Miss Wells's door,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You were not there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This last, of course, to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had something to say to you. I&mdash;I dare say it is hardly pension
+      etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say it there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony smiled above the flannel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could you call it through the door?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hardly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fiddlesticks!&rdquo; said Dr. Gates, rising. &ldquo;I'll go over, of course, but not
+      for long. There's no fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please!&rdquo; she implored. &ldquo;I am not dressed and I'd rather not.&rdquo; She turned
+      to Peter. &ldquo;You can say it before her, can't you? She&mdash;I have told her
+      all about things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that night. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment furnished&mdash;you
+      could learn to use the stove, unless, of course, you don't like
+      housekeeping&mdash;and food is really awfully cheap. Why, at these
+      delicatessen places and bakeshops&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates's quizzical glance fixed on
+      him, and Harmony's startled eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I am trying to say,&rdquo; he exploded, &ldquo;is that I believe if you would
+      marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow.&rdquo; He was talking for
+      time now, against Harmony's incredulous face. &ldquo;You'd be taking on others,
+      of course. I'm not much and I'm as poor&mdash;well, you know. It&mdash;it
+      was the apartment that gave me the idea&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the stove!&rdquo; said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous laughter.
+      After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It was real mirth
+      with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that curious laughter of women that
+      is not far from tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and made a last
+      feeble attempt to stick to his guns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean it. You know I'm not in love with you or you with me, of course.
+      But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might get along. Lord
+      knows I need some one to look after me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Emma?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no Emma. I made her up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony sobered at that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is only&rdquo;&mdash;she gasped a little for breath&mdash;&ldquo;it is only your&mdash;your
+      transparency, Peter.&rdquo; It was the first time she had called him Peter. &ldquo;You
+      know how things are with me and you want to help me, and out of your
+      generosity you are willing to take on another burden. Oh, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat the
+      laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the cover of mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them both
+      sternly through her glasses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once for all,&rdquo; she said brusquely, &ldquo;let such foolishness end. Peter, I am
+      ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you&mdash;not yet, not for a dozen
+      years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not every man can be what
+      you may be if you keep your senses and stay single. And the same is true
+      for you, girl. To tide over a bad six months you would sacrifice the very
+      thing you are both struggling for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure we don't intend to do it,&rdquo; replied Harmony meekly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes, remember what
+      I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal to the other. Now go
+      away and let me alone. I'm not accustomed to proposals of marriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself off to the
+      bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was as comfortable as a
+      washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also Harmony's problem was yet
+      unsolved. Also she had called him Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to warm
+      the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked at his
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; said Peter, still comfortably asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is Dr. Gates.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry, Doctor&mdash;have to 'xcuse me,&rdquo; mumbled Peter from the blanket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open the door just a crack.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up to
+      retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast from the open window blew
+      round him, setting everything movable in the little room to quivering. He
+      fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them, and yawning
+      noisily went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair was out of
+      its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait down
+      her back. She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered
+      shortsightedly at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's about Jimmy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don't know what's got into me, but I've
+      forgotten for three days. It's a good bit more than time for a letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great Scott!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a little.
+      The nurse found him crying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The poor little devil!&rdquo; said Peter contritely. &ldquo;Overdue, is it? I'll fix
+      it to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I'm off at
+      seven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The envelope?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is. And take my candle. I'm going to bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from the twin
+      clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across the
+      city. It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a candle
+      balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had
+      taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry, which
+      weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter being
+      strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine chamois.
+      Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy's point of view and
+      deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a harrowing
+      incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a sort of
+      glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off the
+      chamois.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to Jimmy
+      Conroy&mdash;an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic,
+      bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny
+      village in the Austrian Tyrol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to
+      sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was just two o'clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her ward in
+      the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his pillow, and
+      taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, thou bad one!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Awake, when the Herr Doktor orders sleep!
+      Shall I use the slipper?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the
+      mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter of a
+      certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father has
+      perhaps captured a great boar, or a&mdash;a chamois, and he writes of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do chamois have horns?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja. Great horns&mdash;so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None. Now sleep, or&mdash;the slipper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      So far Harmony's small world in the old city had consisted of Scatchy and
+      the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off in the firmament the
+      master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone, weeping anxious postcards
+      from every way station it is true, but nevertheless gone. Peter and Anna
+      Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds held out. To them now
+      she was about to add Jimmy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor's chaos of pink
+      flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and complete even
+      to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to be presented. It was
+      with mingled emotions that Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to Harmony
+      the next morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He hasn't been so well the last day or two,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He doesn't sleep
+      much&mdash;that's the worst of those heart conditions. Sometimes, while
+      I've been working on this thing, I've wondered&mdash;Well, we're making a
+      fight anyhow. And better take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and
+      make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital, meeting the
+      doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy's little story quite
+      well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear,&rdquo; she had finished. &ldquo;You
+      think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I think I have my
+      own little tragedy, because I have to go through the rest of life alone,
+      when taken in time I'd have been a good wife and mother. Still I have my
+      work. But this little chap, brought over here by a father who hoped to see
+      him cured, and spent all he had to bring him here, and then&mdash;died. It
+      gets me by the throat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the boy does not know?&rdquo; Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the mountains. When
+      we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he was buried. It took about
+      all the money there was. He wrote home about it, too, to the place they
+      came from. There has never been any reply. Then ever since Peter has
+      written these letters. Jimmy lives for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that. Peter thought
+      thus. A very large part of Harmony's life was Peter in those days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for Anna
+      Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his letter
+      that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of the night
+      before. Of the proposal, most of all&mdash;it was so eminently
+      characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its execution.
+      Harmony's thought of Peter was very tender that morning as she stood in
+      the arched gateway out of reach of the wind from the Schneeberg. The
+      tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made her very
+      beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for a bus, and
+      stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm, recognized and admired
+      her. After all, the American women were chic, she decided, although some
+      of the doctors had wives of a dowdiness&mdash;Himmel! And she could copy
+      the Fraulein's hat for two Kronen and a bit of ribbon she possessed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a Dozent
+      with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into it, and the
+      Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could not marry because
+      the hospital board forbade it, made a speech for Jimmy in awe-inspiring
+      German, ending up with a poem that was intended to be funny, but that made
+      the nurses cry. From which it will be seen that Jimmy was a great
+      favorite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a ceremony, Jimmy
+      kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates's hand and waited. That the
+      letter had come was enough. He lay back in anticipatory joy, and let
+      himself be talked over, and bathrobed, and his hair parted Austrian
+      fashion and turned up over a finger, which is very Austrian indeed. He
+      liked Harmony. The girl caught his eyes on her more than once. He
+      interrupted the speech once to ask her just what part of the robe she had
+      made, and whether she had made the tassel. When she admitted the tassel,
+      his admiration became mixed with respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the barred window
+      behind Jimmy's bed, and brought into dazzling radiance the pink bathrobe,
+      and Harmony's eyes, and fat Nurse Elisabet's white apron. It lay on the
+      bedspread in great squares, outlined by the shadows of the window bars.
+      Now and then the sentry, pacing outside, would advance as far as Jimmy's
+      window, and a warlike silhouette of military cap and the upper end of a
+      carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events, however, were rare,
+      the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and the odor of boiling
+      onions from the lodge just inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the nurses went
+      about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a hairpin from her
+      hair and made a great show of opening the many times opened envelope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The letter at last!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Shall I read it or will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You read it. It takes me so long. I'll read it all day, after you are
+      gone. I always do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter's first halting
+      lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold. They were mainly an
+      apology for the delay. Then forgetting discomfort in the joy of creation,
+      he became more comfortable. The account of the near-accident was
+      wonderfully graphic; the description of the chamois was fervid, if not
+      accurate. But consternation came with the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The doctor
+      read on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven's sake,&rdquo; said Peter's frantic postscript, &ldquo;find out how much a
+      medium-sized chamois&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Gates stopped &ldquo;&mdash;ought to weigh,&rdquo; was the rest of it, &ldquo;and fix it
+      right in the letter. The kid's too smart to be fooled and I never saw a
+      chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns, haven't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's funny!&rdquo; said Jimmy Conway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake,&rdquo; remarked Dr. Gates,
+      with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; observed Harmony, leaning forward, &ldquo;that little boys must not
+      ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is only six weeks off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the boar's
+      tusks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter of a boar,
+      had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of tusks. The tusks had not
+      been so difficult. But horns!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more questions. The
+      morning's excitement had tired him, and he lay back. Dr. Gates went to
+      hold a whispered consultation with the nurse, and came back, looking
+      grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony&mdash;to find some
+      one worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire of women to do
+      something, however small, for some one else. Her own troubles looked very
+      small to her that day as she left the hospital and stepped out into the
+      bright sunshine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you wish to do a very kind thing?&rdquo; she asked in German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea, and nay,
+      nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the sun was
+      moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you wish?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do not
+      think&mdash;perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not, now and
+      then, pass the window? It pleases him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pass the window! But why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and the gun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, the gun!&rdquo; He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an officer
+      appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he stiffened
+      into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the girl knew he
+      would do as she had desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the professors
+      at the hospital desired English conversation at two Kronen an hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony was
+      engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did much more than
+      offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her self-confidence,
+      although the immediate result was rather tragic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with Harmony,
+      engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that afternoon. It was
+      the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived five minutes late, panting,
+      hat awry, and so full of the Frau Professor Bergmeister that she could
+      think of nothing else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her fifty Kronen
+      before the secretary as she went in. The master was out of humor. Should
+      he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept waiting for a chit of a girl&mdash;only,
+      of course, he said &ldquo;das Kindchen&rdquo; or some other German equivalent for chit&mdash;and
+      then have her come into the sacred presence breathless, and salute him
+      between gasps as the Frau Professor Bergmeister?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also rather
+      tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped her
+      bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one's infant child
+      from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage when with
+      a lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at Harmony. Then
+      with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked to the outer room, and
+      picking up the envelope with the fifty Kronen held it out to her without a
+      word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly at the
+      envelope in her hand, at the master's retreating back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled together.
+      Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady secretary touched her
+      arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is sorry.
+      You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will be well. You are
+      his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat for grief that he has
+      hurt you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary's voice was unmistakable.
+      Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the two students who had
+      laughed. They were not laughing now. Something of fellowship and
+      understanding passed between them in the glance. After all, it was in the
+      day's work&mdash;would come to one of them next, perhaps. And they had
+      much in common&mdash;the struggle, their faith, the everlasting
+      loneliness, the little white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of days, Harmony
+      went down the three long flights and out into the brightness of the winter
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward her, giving
+      a definite impression of being bound for some particular destination and
+      of being behind time. That this was not the case was shown by the celerity
+      with which, when he saw Harmony, he turned about and walked with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had an hour or two,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;and I thought I'd walk. But walking
+      is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk alone. How about the Frau
+      Professor?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has taken me on. I'm very happy. But, Dr. Byrne&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You called me Peter last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was different. You had just proposed to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if that's all that's necessary&mdash;&rdquo; He stopped in the center of
+      the busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For instance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never owned anything taxable except a dog&mdash;and that wasn't a tax
+      anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or surgery,
+      where I'd be of some use?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I've got something to say on that.&rdquo; He pulled from his overcoat
+      pocket a largish bundle&mdash;Peter always bulged with packages&mdash;and
+      held it out for her to see. &ldquo;Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my
+      compliments,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that because some idiot at home sent me five
+      pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here, I
+      have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian
+      customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty. I
+      offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars was
+      fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She reached over
+      and patted his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll make it up in some way. Can't you cut off some little
+      extravagance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might cut down on my tailor bills.&rdquo; He looked down at himself
+      whimsically. &ldquo;Or on ties. I'm positively reckless about ties!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that
+      eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a dog-trot.
+      Peter looked at them critically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bosnians,&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out of
+      ten of them tubercular. It's a rotten game, this military play of Europe.
+      How's Jimmy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We left him very happy with your letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter flushed. &ldquo;I expect it was pretty poor stuff,&rdquo; he apologized. &ldquo;I've
+      never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says his father will surely send him the horns.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an eagle?
+      One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the
+      letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he
+      talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only
+      there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club at
+      home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his hobby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scum of the earth, most of them,&rdquo; he said, his plain face glowing. &ldquo;Dirty
+      little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco; and one of
+      them pawned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing the game
+      right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them! Used to line 'em
+      up and make 'em spell, and the two best spellers were allowed to fight it
+      out with gloves&mdash;my own method, and it worked. Spell! They'd spell
+      their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee, how I hated to give
+      them up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before.
+      For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always
+      seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother
+      attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof. Peter
+      felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension
+      Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in ulster
+      and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was coming down
+      with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up the staircase
+      like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed Peter and
+      Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been waiting for you two,&rdquo; she flung at them. &ldquo;I've had a terrific
+      row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after
+      everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung, at
+      first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the sharp
+      little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, child.&rdquo; Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. &ldquo;You are fagged
+      out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much did
+      it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it
+      will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper, I'm
+      sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,
+      and Harmony shall keep house for us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in the
+      cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the conversational bomb
+      that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of
+      Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars&mdash;back, but with a
+      difference. True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges,
+      obedient to every whim of the December gales; but the casement windows in
+      the salon no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll
+      of rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented
+      extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a battered
+      but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a table with an
+      oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove gleamed warm with
+      fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined medical books of Peter
+      and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they used in common.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria Theresa.
+      But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the stove open,
+      and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed, with Harmony
+      playing softly, it took resolution on Peter's part to put on his overcoat
+      and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a discussion of the
+      function of the pituitary body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only
+      greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal, which
+      had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they bought in
+      quantity and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp was a trifle.
+      They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across boasted a deer
+      from the mountains. They had other game occasionally, when Peter, carrying
+      home a mysterious package, would make them guess what it might contain.
+      Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits. She knew how to cook
+      rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing to
+      make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance of
+      Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the
+      tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch
+      him. Peter was firm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be too obstinate, Peter,&rdquo; she admonished him. &ldquo;The child needs
+      occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the
+      financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her
+      heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur from
+      Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna almost
+      to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make certain of
+      her usefulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier
+      shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of the
+      brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the Austrians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least of
+      all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women, and
+      Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound or two
+      in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was growing
+      round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real change was
+      in Harmony herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which
+      such changes come&mdash;not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a
+      breath. One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion,
+      quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional introspection
+      and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman, tender but not
+      shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified on occasion, but
+      with little girlish lapses into frolic and high spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had been
+      settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the Pension
+      Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be recalled,
+      along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every odor of
+      stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had had a bad
+      week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In vain the
+      sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and nodded through
+      it; in vain&mdash;when the street was deserted and there was none to
+      notice&mdash;he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the pavement
+      outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and ringing clang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing
+      unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as never
+      was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he carefully
+      emphasized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the aid
+      of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the barred
+      window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had almost
+      fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the manual of
+      arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all most
+      exciting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken him
+      some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in jelly
+      and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had been a
+      great success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near his
+      heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The horns haven't come, have they?&rdquo; he asked wistfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think he got my letter about them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He answered it, didn't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy drew a long breath. &ldquo;It's very funny. He's mostly so quick. If I had
+      the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the bed.
+      And I could pretend I was hunting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw
+      hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store a
+      fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head
+      down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the
+      shop door as if mutely begging admission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.
+      Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The wild-game
+      seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he would mount head
+      and antlers for his wife's cousin in Galicia as a Christmas gift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was profoundly
+      depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early and was
+      building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile. Anna was not
+      yet home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a
+      movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always beautiful,
+      but&mdash;you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is because you like me. We always think our friends are beautiful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table, and
+      Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast fading
+      into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few street
+      sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from the world
+      of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying humanity, lay
+      the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed halls, its dark and
+      twisting staircases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with the
+      girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had been
+      growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was very
+      comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
+      Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are
+      written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger
+      gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed
+      gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship,
+      and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does not
+      thrive on hunger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the
+      struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy life.
+      Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken himself
+      savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the luxury of
+      tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck. So he had
+      kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And now!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he was
+      much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands
+      hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features. Harmony,
+      knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you are sad to-night, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Depressed a bit. That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't money again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before
+      Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a
+      hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been
+      very upsetting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not more than usual. Don't mind me. I'll probably end in a roaring bad
+      temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested a
+      hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have hurt you in some way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could&mdash;could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wouldn't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't quarreled with Anna?&rdquo; Harmony asked, real concern in her
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Good Lord, Harmony, don't ask me what's wrong! I don't know myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the wall.
+      Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen was
+      entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare floor and
+      the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and the candle
+      when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dearest,&rdquo; he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him, was
+      kissing her lips, her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him. The
+      gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved
+      senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go.
+      Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had
+      torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left her
+      only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him breathing.
+      He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that was left in
+      him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms again and keep
+      her there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned and
+      faced him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter,&rdquo; she said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't any question about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still
+      obsessed him. &ldquo;Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If there is
+      a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and loneliness&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has not made me happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual.
+      Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He knew
+      then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would rather not talk about it, please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and
+      was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and,
+      after his habit, shook himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, we'll not talk of it. But, for Heaven's sake, Harmony, don't
+      avoid me. I'm not a cad. I'll let you alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of promise
+      from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered the
+      kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an already
+      overfed stove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty city
+      fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two hours
+      later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers
+      nothing, the Portier's wife awakened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the
+      Portier's wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the
+      Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen
+      seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he
+      ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic
+      respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like
+      evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier's wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing to
+      the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping that
+      day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty air. Words
+      had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in
+      unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up&mdash;the floor was cold
+      and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer
+      across the street, as it swung on its hook?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron
+      candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the Portier's
+      pillow. No startled yell followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier's wife forgot the cold floor and the
+      wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even stood
+      open an inch or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door and
+      waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned kept her
+      warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an hour. The
+      candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice to red-hot
+      fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain swung in the
+      wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had changed
+      to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert Society&mdash;What
+      was that?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now lighted,
+      and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou hast been out of thy bed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An hour since the bed was empty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou dreamest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The chain is off the door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the Americans above?
+      Sleep and keep peace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier's wife crawled into
+      her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson feather comfort. But
+      her soul was shaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones out to do
+      his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might be told by the soles
+      of the feet, which were always soiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At dawn the Portier's wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her sleeping
+      lord's feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite black, as of one who
+      had tramped in garden mould.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened the door
+      from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set out a pitcher for
+      the milk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across the
+      street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was written the one
+      word, &ldquo;Still!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps by which
+      the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great leaps but with a
+      thousand small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves its mark, a
+      footprint on a naked soul. We trace a life by its scars, as a tree by its
+      rings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and this with
+      every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine affection for the
+      girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions that
+      Harmony's veil had been woven. To Anna Gates, worn with a thousand
+      sleepless nights, a thousand thankless days, withered before her time with
+      the struggling routine of medical practice, sapped with endless calls for
+      sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became
+      physiological.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was rent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious creed, a
+      philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung strange
+      bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities, personal
+      liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law and the
+      prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and her prophet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no mischief.
+      Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even in the event of the
+      opportunity it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength of her
+      convictions. Men love theories, but seldom have the courage of them, and
+      Anna Gates was largely masculine. Women, being literal, are apt to absorb
+      dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When it is false doctrine they
+      discover it too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was now a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to
+      harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony's eyes
+      widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased her more
+      than to pit her individualism against the girl's rigid and conventional
+      morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took place&mdash;hardly
+      an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing. Anna had taken a
+      heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been practicing, and at the
+      end she played a little winter song by some modern composer. It breathed
+      all the purity of a white winter's day; it was as chaste as ice and as
+      cold; and yet throughout was the thought of green things hiding beneath
+      the snow and the hope of spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather ashamed
+      of her thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems that way to me,&rdquo; she finished apologetically. &ldquo;It sounds rather
+      silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes certain
+      things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this gentleman who writes of winter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it, exactly
+      as in books&mdash;the difference between a love story and&mdash;and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;a dictionary!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You always laugh,&rdquo; Harmony complained
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in
+      this world I want to weep always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there
+      are good ones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are plenty of good men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you call a good man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Honorable men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna smiled. &ldquo;My dear child,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you substitute the code of a
+      gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!
+      When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.
+      To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman&mdash;and a fifth over&mdash;for
+      every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples there is a
+      derelict like myself, mateless.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her
+      resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless, brought
+      forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the atmosphere in
+      which Harmony had been reared single women were always presumed to be thus
+      by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those weaker sisters who
+      had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly a derelict, frankly
+      regretted her maiden condition and railed with bitterness against her
+      enforced childlessness. The near approach of Christmas had for years found
+      her morose and resentful. There are, here and there, such women,
+      essentially mothers but not necessarily wives, their sole passion that of
+      maternity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her
+      resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and offered
+      her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of the
+      individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and though
+      refusing to accept Anna's theories, found her faith in her own weakened.
+      She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up out of her
+      discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written high in its
+      firmament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the girl's
+      stricken face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a fool!&rdquo; she said contritely. &ldquo;If Peter had been here he'd have
+      throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and theorists
+      are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about us&mdash;we
+      never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I've been
+      talking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for
+      Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony
+      from New York. The Big Soprano was very glad to be back and spent two
+      pages over her chances for concert work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;... I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had had the
+      money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing 'Brunnhilde,' it would have
+      helped a lot. I could have said I'd sung in opera in Europe and at least
+      have had a hearing at the Met. But I didn't, and I'm back at the church
+      again and glad to get my old salary. If it's at all possible, stay until
+      the master has presented you in a concert. He's quite right, you haven't a
+      chance unless he does. And now I'll quit grumbling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely, flushed with
+      excitement and having been up since dawn curling her hair. He was rather a
+      disappointment&mdash;small and blond, with light blue eyes, and almost
+      dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn't care how pale a man's eyes were if he
+      looked at me the way Henry looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to be alone
+      together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could swallow for the lump in
+      my throat, by myself. I was homesick enough in old Wien, but I am just as
+      homesick now that I am here, for we are really homesick only for people,
+      not places. And no one really cared whether I came back or not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day before, but
+      with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the situation was unpleasant
+      and decide to leave? What if a reckless impulse, recklessly carried out,
+      were to break up an arrangement that had made a green oasis of happiness
+      and content for all of them in the desert of their common despair?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to argue, to
+      justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally. He almost groaned
+      aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the wintry garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his word. &ldquo;I am
+      not a beast. I'll let you alone,&rdquo; he had said. She had had a bad night, as
+      nights go. She had gone through the painful introspection which, in a
+      thoroughly good girl, always follows such an outburst as Peter's. Had she
+      said or done anything to make him think&mdash;Surely she had not! Had she
+      been wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an unaccustomed
+      silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron candlestick in hand,
+      Harmony, having read the Litany through in the not particularly religious
+      hope of getting to sleep, was dreaming placidly. It was Peter who tossed
+      and turned almost all night. Truly there had been little sleep that night
+      in the old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the kitchen while
+      supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories forgotten and wearing a
+      knitted shawl against drafts, was making a salad, and Harmony, all anxiety
+      and flushed with heat, was broiling a steak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and prayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter,&rdquo; she called, &ldquo;you may set the table. And try to lay the cloth
+      straight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched business
+      of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose I refuse?&rdquo; he questioned. &ldquo;You&mdash;you haven't been very
+      friendly with me to-day, Harry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't quarrel, you children,&rdquo; cried Anna, beating eggs vigorously.
+      &ldquo;Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The Portier loves her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure I said good-evening to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You usually say, 'Good-evening, Peter.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I did not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You did not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;Good-evening, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday's
+      promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with forgiveness and
+      restoration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; said Peter humbly, &ldquo;when I am in very great favor, you say,
+      'Good-evening, Peter, dear.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-evening, Peter, dear,&rdquo; said Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving smoothly.
+      Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and through Marie's frugality
+      and the extra month's wages at Christmas, which was Marie's annual
+      perquisite, being temporarily in funds the sky seemed clear enough, and
+      Walter Stewart started on his holiday with a comfortable sense of
+      financial security.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie's temporary exile
+      in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of the
+      little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with long
+      inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's kitchen and
+      the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She disapproved of Stewart,
+      having heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or
+      suspicious about this orderly establishment. Mrs. Boyer was a placid,
+      motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card club, her grown
+      children, her household gods of thirty years' accumulation, that &ldquo;Frank&rdquo;
+       might catch up with his profession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had explained it rather tremulously at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father wants to go,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You children are big enough now to be
+      left. He's always wanted to do it, but we couldn't go while you were
+      little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, mother!&rdquo; expostulated the oldest girl. &ldquo;When you are so afraid of
+      the ocean! And a year!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is to be will be,&rdquo; she had replied. &ldquo;If I'm going to be drowned I'll
+      be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub. And I'll not let
+      father go alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the children
+      gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so elaborate a
+      wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase anything abroad.
+      She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest her eyes lead her
+      into the temptation of the shops. In Vienna she wore her home-town outfit
+      with determination, vaguely conscious that the women about her had more
+      style, were different. She priced unsuitable garments wistfully, and went
+      home to her trunks full of best materials that would never wear out. The
+      children, knowing her, had bought the best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is hard to say
+      by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory. It was
+      as though his own status gained by it. He had much the same feeling about
+      the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as if
+      irregularity were thus regularized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn an
+      experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn under
+      her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very pretty, rather
+      frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire
+      evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so
+      conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart breaking the law and
+      trying to keep the letter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There was much to
+      do. The house must be left clean and shining. There must be no feminine
+      gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely masculine
+      establishment. At the last moment, so late that it sent her heart into her
+      mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from Stewart's watchful
+      eyes. She gave it to the milk girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr Doktor's
+      American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy, bound with iron.
+      And with her own clothing she packed Stewart's, the dress-suit he had worn
+      once to the Embassy, a hat that folded, strange American shoes, and books&mdash;always
+      books. The Herr Doktor would study at Semmering. When all was in readiness
+      and Stewart was taking a final survey, Marie ran downstairs and summoned a
+      cab. It did not occur to her to ask him to do it. Marie's small life was
+      one of service, and besides there was an element in their relationship
+      that no one but Marie suspected, and that she hid even from herself. She
+      was very much in love with this indifferent American, this captious
+      temporary god of her domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred
+      to Stewart; but Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had more
+      than once caught a look in Marie's eyes as she turned them on the other
+      man, and had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the train was well under way, however, and he found no disturbing
+      element among the three others in the compartment, Stewart relaxed.
+      Semmering was a favorite resort with the American colony, but not until
+      later in the winter. In December there were rains in the mountains, and
+      low-lying clouds that invested some of the chalets in constant fog. It was
+      not until the middle of January that the little mountain train became
+      crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and jaunty
+      feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with Alpine cloaks
+      and iron-pointed sticks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her life,
+      and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very shadow of the
+      Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles or so away
+      above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed the cog railroad, she
+      had seen its white head turn rosy in the setting sun, and once when a
+      German tourist from Munich had handed her his fieldglass she had even made
+      out some of the crosses that showed where travelers had met their deaths.
+      Now she would be very close. If the weather were good, she might even say
+      a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of those who had died.
+      It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when one has money and
+      leisure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up the
+      mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were moments when the
+      track held to the cliffs only by gigantic fingers of steel, while far
+      below were peaceful valleys and pink-and-blue houses and churches with
+      gilded spires. There were vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed, and
+      always there were tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a child in
+      others; she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched him for
+      comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so dark,&rdquo; she apologized, &ldquo;and it frightens me, the mountain heart.
+      In your America, have you so great mountains?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood racing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much larger,&rdquo; he said magnificently. &ldquo;I haven't seen a hill in Europe I'd
+      exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the mountains there we use
+      railway coaches. These toy railroads are a joke. At home we'd use 'em as
+      street-cars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really! I should like to see America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So should I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America was apt
+      to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him, which was even
+      worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not repulsed, became silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left the
+      train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the platform beer
+      and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train resumed its clanking
+      progress they ate luncheon, drinking the beer from the bottles and slicing
+      the sausage with a penknife. It was a joyous trip, a red-letter day in the
+      girl's rather sordid if not uneventful life. The Herr Doktor was pleased
+      with her. He liked her hat, and when she flushed with pleasure demanded
+      proof that she was not rouged. Proof was forthcoming. She rubbed her
+      cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and produced in triumph its
+      unreddened purity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou suspicious one!&rdquo; she pouted. &ldquo;I must take off the skin to assure
+      thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a good child.&rdquo; He stooped over and kissed one scarlet cheek and
+      then being very comfortable and the beer having made him drowsy, he put
+      his head in her lap and slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered above and
+      the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near. They were
+      frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were long lines of granite
+      avalanche sheds. The little passage of the car was full of tourists
+      looking down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are very close, I am sure,&rdquo; an American girl was saying just outside
+      the doorway. &ldquo;See, isn't that the Kurhaus? There, it is lost again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had spoken was
+      young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the first time and moved to
+      a more decorous distance from Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her thoughts were
+      busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also and the Herr Doktor
+      would meet her. But that was foolish! There were other resorts besides
+      Semmering, and in the little villa to which they went there would be no
+      Americans. It was childish to worry about a girl whose back and profile
+      only she had seen. Also profiles were deceptive; there was the matter of
+      the ears. Marie's ears were small and set close to her head. If the
+      American Fraulein's ears stuck out or her face were only short and wide!
+      But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once swiftly into the
+      compartment. She was quite lovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of stretching and
+      yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not speak to the girl; Marie
+      noted that with some comfort. But shortly after she saw him conversing
+      easily with a male member of the party. Her heart sank again. Life was
+      moving very fast for Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered his own
+      cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels together, a German
+      custom he had picked up. The girl was impressed; Marie saw that. When they
+      drew into the station at Semmering Stewart helped the American party off
+      first and then came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than the little
+      Austrian's would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape attention, once
+      they were out of the train and moving toward the gate of the station. He
+      stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the hand-luggage and picked it
+      up again, as though it weighed heavily, whereas it was both small and
+      light. He loitered through the gate and paused to exchange a word with the
+      gateman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh and well up
+      the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated side by side in a
+      straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a robe over their knees, and
+      a noisy driver high above them on the driving-seat. Stewart spoke to her
+      then, the first time for half an hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered wide over
+      the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens, hidden from the
+      roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery separated by valleys. One
+      might live in one part of Semmering for a month and never suspect the
+      existence of other parts, or wander over steep roads and paths for days
+      and never pass twice over the same one. The Herr Doktor might not see the
+      American girl again&mdash;and if he did! Did he not see American girls
+      wherever he went?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing. Below in
+      the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue shadows, of cows
+      with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of houses with dark faces
+      that opened an eye of lamplight as one looked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Across the valley and far above&mdash;Marie pointed without words. Her
+      small heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it, steeper,
+      more beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset hue of rose was
+      the Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation as he gazed with her. He
+      reached over and covered both her hands with his large one under the robe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of ecstasy, leaned
+      back and watched the mountain; its crown faded from rose to gold, from
+      gold to purple with a thread of black. There was a shadow on the side that
+      looked like a cross. Marie stopped the sleigh at a wayside shrine, and
+      getting out knelt to say a prayer for the travelers who had died on the
+      Rax. They had taken a room at a small villa where board was cheap, and
+      where the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier sort from Bavaria.
+      Both the season and the modest character of the establishment promised
+      them quiet and seclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury. It clung
+      to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor, looked out from the
+      back of the building over the valley, which fell away almost sheer from
+      beneath their windows. A tiny balcony outside, with access to it by a door
+      from the bedroom, looked far down on the tops of tall pines. It made Marie
+      dizzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be unpacked and
+      the Herr Doktor's things put away, his shoes in rows, as he liked them,
+      and his shaving materials laid out on the washstand. Then there was a new
+      dress to put on, that she might do him credit at supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and the draft
+      under the balcony door; the light was wrong for shaving. But the truth
+      came out at last and found Marie not unprepared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fact is,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'm not going to eat with you to-night, dear. I'm
+      going to the hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With the Americans?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother&mdash;with the
+      young man you saw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to take off
+      the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just fastened and
+      fighting back tears as she struggled with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not sulking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you change your clothes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish to wear
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had walked for
+      five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel he found the party
+      waiting for him, the women in evening gowns. The girl, whose name was
+      Anita, was bewitching in pale green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind once more&mdash;a
+      perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation, enlivened by a bit of sweet
+      champagne, an hour or two on the terrace afterward with the women in furs,
+      and stars making a jeweled crown for the Rax.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and opening the
+      door of the room found her missing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the balcony
+      and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold, but she was wise
+      with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didst thou have a fine evening?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonderful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good, little Marie!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The card in the American Doctors' Club brought a response finally. It was
+      just in time. Harmony's funds were low, and the Frau Professor Bergmeister
+      had gone to St. Moritz for the winter. She regretted the English lessons,
+      but there were always English at St. Moritz and it cost nothing to talk
+      with them. Before she left she made Harmony a present. &ldquo;For Christmas,&rdquo;
+       she explained. It was a glass pin-tray, decorated beneath with labels from
+      the Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a picture of the Emperor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east
+      wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old garden
+      gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it. It flew back
+      violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in process of egress down the
+      walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer, clad as usual in the best broadcloth
+      and wearing her old sable cape, made over according to her oldest
+      daughter's ideas into a staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the path now
+      and Mrs. Boyer was gasping for breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm so sorry!&rdquo; Harmony exclaimed. &ldquo;It was stupid of me; but the wind&mdash;Is
+      this your muff?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to extract
+      a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down the broadcloth.
+      Harmony stood apologetically by. It is explanatory of Mrs. Boyer's face,
+      attitude, and costume that the girl addressed her in English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I backed in,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;So few people come, and no Americans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this humble
+      apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It really is no matter,&rdquo; she said, still coolly but with indications of
+      thawing. &ldquo;I am only glad it did not strike my nose. I dare say it would
+      have, but I was looking up to see if it were going to snow.&rdquo; Here she saw
+      the violin case and became almost affable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a card in the Doctors' Club, and I called&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Miss Wells. The card is mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin lessons
+      and I offered to come. The mother is very busy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can talk
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the tea. She
+      had had no good tea since she had left England, and was inclined to
+      suspect all of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead, explaining
+      this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door, here an ancient bit of
+      furniture not considered worthy of salvage, there a closed and locked
+      room, home of ghosts and legends. To Harmony this elderly woman, climbing
+      slowly behind her, was a bit of home. There had been many such in her
+      life; women no longer young, friends of her mother's who were friends of
+      hers; women to whom she had been wont to pay the courtesy of a potted
+      hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas or a bit of custard during an
+      illness. She had missed them all cruelly, as she had missed many things&mdash;her
+      mother, her church, her small gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau
+      Professor Bergmeister might allay her longing for these comfortable,
+      middle-aged, placid-eyed friends of hers. But the Frau Professor
+      Bergmeister had proved to be a frivolous and garrulous old woman, who
+      substituted ease for comfort, and who burned a candle on the name-day of
+      her first husband while her second was safely out of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way up the
+      stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily engaged
+      in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples Harmony had had
+      about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to get them safely out of
+      the place and to the hospital. So Peter was polishing the horns. Harmony
+      had not expected to find him home, and paused, rather startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I didn't know you were home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter spoke without turning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try to bear up under it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'm home and hungry, sweetheart!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter, please!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in the salon
+      and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But that keen-eyed lady
+      had known him before he turned, had taken in the domesticity of the scene
+      and Peter's part in it, and had drawn the swift conclusion of the pure of
+      heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll come again,&rdquo; she said hurriedly. &ldquo;I&mdash;I must really get home.
+      Dr. Boyer will be there, and wondering&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Boyer!&rdquo; Peter knew her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn't it? How unexpected to find you here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I live here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I surmised.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three of us,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;You know Anna Gates, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid not. Really I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost damning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken me in as
+      a boarder. Please sit down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly puzzled at
+      Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two single women and
+      one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative strangers, setting up
+      housekeeping together had never occurred to her. Many a single woman whom
+      she knew at home took a gentleman into the house as a roomer, and
+      thereafter referred to him as &ldquo;he&rdquo; and spent hours airing the curtains of
+      smoke and even, as &ldquo;he&rdquo; became a member of the family, in sewing on his
+      buttons. There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement; merely a
+      concession to economic pressure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but bustling
+      about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her cheeks flushed with
+      excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau Professor had gone, the
+      prospect of a music pupil meant everything. An American child, too! Fond
+      as Harmony was of children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who walked
+      the parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and fixed eyes
+      through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted her. They were
+      never alone, those Austrian children&mdash;always under surveillance,
+      always restrained, always prepared to kiss the hand of whatever relative
+      might be near and to take themselves of to anywhere so it were somewhere
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American child,&rdquo; said
+      Harmony, bringing in the tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the American
+      child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked most
+      irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult situation
+      with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea was good;
+      that was one thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the concession of
+      putting it on a chair as savoring too much of acceptance if not approval,
+      and sipped her tea out of a spoon as becomes a tea-lover. Peter, who
+      loathed tea, lounged about the room, clearly in the way, but fearful to
+      leave Harmony alone with her. She was quite likely, at the first
+      opportunity, to read her a lesson on the conventions, if nothing worse; to
+      upset the delicate balance of the little household he was guarding. So he
+      stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story, while Harmony
+      toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the lessons. None
+      came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and put down her cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was very refreshing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Where shall I find the street-car?
+      I walked out, but it is late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take you to the car.&rdquo; Peter picked up his old hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the conductors
+      double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how can they when it is
+      the wrong car?&rdquo; She bowed to Harmony without shaking hands. &ldquo;Thank you for
+      the tea. It was really good. Where do you get it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Not a word about the lessons or the American child!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said something about my card in the Doctors' Club&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something wistful in the girl's eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand and her
+      voice was not so hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social visit and
+      we'll not spoil it with business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really think the boy's mother must attend to that herself. But I shall
+      tell her where to find you, and&rdquo;&mdash;here she glanced at Peter&mdash;&ldquo;all
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said Harmony gratefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and through
+      the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind them he turned
+      and faced her:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The result was
+      a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She drew her ample
+      proportions into a dignity that was almost majesty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without
+      foundation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad of that.&rdquo; There was no conviction in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony's sake, &ldquo;I
+      suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is not a young
+      woman by any means, and she takes very good care of Miss Wells. There were
+      reasons why this seemed the best thing to do. Miss Wells was alone and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a Dr. Gates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. If you will come back and wait she'll be along very soon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced that there
+      might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the situation was
+      anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in that she had lost the
+      anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a piece of her mind. She walked along
+      beside him without speaking until they reached the street-car line. Then
+      she turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You called her&mdash;you spoke to her very affectionately, young man,&rdquo;
+       she accused him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some perversion
+      of humor seized him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Mrs. Boyer,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that was in jest purely. Besides, I did
+      not know that you were there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged American
+      womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and settled its
+      broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the cane seat. It was
+      outraged American womanhood that flung open the door of Marie Jedlicka's
+      flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka's sitting room confronted her
+      husband as he read a month-old newspaper from home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?&rdquo; she demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned to meet
+      domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good humor, or at the
+      most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Gates&mdash;Anna Gates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I don't know
+      their names.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where does Peter Byrne live?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything to eat or
+      do we sup of Peter Byrne?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom of Marie
+      Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of the beds with the
+      crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing about rooms. There was no
+      change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie's tiny
+      slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial
+      house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it
+      hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that
+      soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that
+      there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential
+      qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not
+      people? That when grandfather's wraith is seen in his old armchair it is
+      the chair that produces it, while grandfather himself serenely haunts the
+      shades of some vast wilderness of departed spirits?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was
+      exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where the most
+      orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no attraction whatever in the
+      thing they are asked to believe. Mrs. Boyer, who would have regarded it as
+      heterodox to substitute any other instrument for the harp of her
+      expectation, tied on her gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka's mirror, and
+      thought of Harmony and of the girls at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less shocked than
+      she had expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not your affair or mine,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It's Byrne's business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of the girl!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even if you are right it's rather late, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could tell him what you think of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living with a
+      representative male had never taught his wife the reserves among members
+      of the sex masculine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might, but I don't intend to,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And if you listen to me you'll
+      keep the thing to yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils,&rdquo; snapped Mrs.
+      Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand painful
+      steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked soul. The soul was
+      Harmony's; the foot&mdash;was it not encased at that moment in Mrs.
+      Boyer's comfortable house shoes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on her car,
+      went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat, and with the
+      sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too indignant to be cold. He
+      ran up the staircase, hearing on all sides the creaking and banging with
+      which the old house resented a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria
+      Theresa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her face
+      hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when he entered.
+      Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She quivered under it and
+      he took it away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little,&rdquo; very smothered. &ldquo;Just dis-disappointment. Don't mind me,
+      Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean about the pupil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now more than
+      ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had stained her cheek. She
+      looked rather hectic, very lovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did she change so when she saw you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might have
+      said, safe things. Not one came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&mdash;she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry,&rdquo; he said gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Anna?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters,&rdquo; he added
+      hastily. &ldquo;I'll make Anna go to her and explain. It's her infernal jumping
+      to a conclusion that makes me crazy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will talk, Peter. I am frightened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take Anna to-night and we'll go to Boyer's. I'll make that woman get
+      down on her knees to you. I'll&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll make bad very much worse,&rdquo; said Harmony dejectedly. &ldquo;When a thing
+      has to be explained it does no good to explain it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As in the
+      dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the compelling influence of
+      her nearness. He wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life
+      before, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bid defiance to
+      evil tongues. He was afraid of himself. To gain a moment he put a chair
+      between them and stood, strong hands gripping its back, looking down at
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one thing we could do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it&mdash;it might not
+      be so bad for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course, but&mdash;not
+      that way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even if I wish it very much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are thinking of my future&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you care a
+      little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are lonely and I am the
+      only person you see much, so you think you want to marry me. You don't
+      really. You want to help me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny his
+      altruism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer, compared
+      with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the compelling motive
+      after all, his need of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be a rotten match for you,&rdquo; he agreed. &ldquo;I only thought, perhaps&mdash;You
+      are right, of course; you ought not to marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what about you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought not, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony rose, smiling a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then that's settled. And for goodness' sake, Peter, stop proposing to me
+      every time things go wrong.&rdquo; Her voice changed, grew grave and older, much
+      older than Peter's. &ldquo;We must not marry, either of us, Peter. Anna is
+      right. There might be an excuse if we were very much in love: but we are
+      not. And loneliness is not a reason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very lonely,&rdquo; said Peter wistfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning and
+      approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere of mystery
+      that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a good night and
+      having taken the morning's medicine without argument, had been allowed up
+      in a roller chair. It struck Peter with a pang that the boy looked more
+      frail day by day, more transparent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have brought you,&rdquo; said Peter gravely, &ldquo;the cod-liver oil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then guess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dad's letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've just had one. Don't be a piggy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Animal, vegetable, or mineral?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vegetable,&rdquo; said Peter shamelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soft or hard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soft.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be vegetable;
+      they could hardly be soft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A kitten?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A kitten is not vegetable, James.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!&rdquo; For by this time Harmony was his
+      very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which consisted of Nurse
+      Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna and Peter, and of course the
+      sentry, who did not know that he belonged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gelatin, to be sure,&rdquo; replied Peter, and produced the horns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row of beds,
+      its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if to add a touch of
+      completeness the sentry outside, peering in, saw the wheeled chair with
+      its occupant, and celebrated this advance along the road to recovery by
+      placing on the window-ledge a wooden replica of himself, bayonet and all,
+      carved from a bit of cigar box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody is very nice to me,&rdquo; said Jimmy contentedly. &ldquo;When my father
+      comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who are kind to me.
+      There was a woman on the ship&mdash;What is bulging your pocket, Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My handkerchief.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood up
+      before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward watched joyously, while
+      from pocket after pocket of Peter's old gray suit came Jimmy's salvage&mdash;two
+      nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout colonel of
+      hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier waiting to go
+      through the various salutations due his rank before assisting him. A gala
+      day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the little mountain town
+      with only a name on the cross at its head, and if one did not notice that
+      the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands soon tired of playing and
+      lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was much inured to death and
+      lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her almost fiercely as she
+      lifted him back from the chair into the smooth white bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of the deer
+      beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping guard.
+      As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet beckoning
+      to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the sentinel on guard
+      and tiptoed down the room. Just outside, round a corner, was the Dozent's
+      laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where he slept, where on a stand
+      was the photograph of the lady he would marry when he had become a
+      professor and required no one's consent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which kept the
+      boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with Austrian intrigue had
+      made him invaluable. He it was who had originated the idea of making Jimmy
+      responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly Trager quarreling
+      over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or brawling over his soup
+      with another patient, was likely to be hailed in a thin soprano, and to
+      stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in mixed English and German,
+      restored the decorum of the ward. They were a quarrelsome lot, the
+      convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling disputes and awarding
+      decisions that he slept almost all night. This was as it should be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white coat,
+      stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous. He held out a
+      letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This has come for the child,&rdquo; he said in quite good English. He was
+      obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans
+      who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with which
+      some day he would marry. He liked the English language; he liked Americans
+      because they learned quickly. He held out an envelope with a black border
+      and Peter took it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From Paris!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Who in the world&mdash;I suppose I'd better open
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I thought. It appears a letter of&mdash;how you say it? Ah, yes,
+      condolence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave it open
+      to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent read
+      it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of sugar.
+      Peter's face was very sober.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a baby&mdash;went
+      on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her, which is a good
+      thing. She seems to have been a bad lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She comes to take him away. That is impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course it is impossible,&rdquo; said Peter savagely. &ldquo;She's not going to see
+      the child if I can help it. She left because&mdash;she's the boy's mother,
+      but that's the best you can say of her. This letter&mdash;Well, you've
+      read it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is as a stranger to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely. She will come in mourning&mdash;look at that black border&mdash;and
+      tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the type.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched, as
+      does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the gushing letter in his
+      hand and thought fiercely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is on her way here,&rdquo; said the Dozent. &ldquo;That is bad. Paris to Wien is
+      two days and a night. She may hourly arrive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might send him away&mdash;to another hospital.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had I a home&mdash;&rdquo; he said, and glanced through the door to the
+      portrait on the stand. &ldquo;It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for
+      a time. In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a
+      fit person the boy could be given to her. It is, of course, an affair of
+      police.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
+      imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail. He read
+      the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy's mother, and
+      failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy slept. A burly convalescent,
+      with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general appearance of an
+      assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up the blanket round
+      the small shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day,&rdquo; said the
+      Dozent. &ldquo;That gives us a few hours. She will go to the police, and
+      to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the mean time,&rdquo; Peter replied, &ldquo;I'll try to think of something. If I
+      thought she could be warned and would leave him here&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with him
+      through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to be there for
+      carnival, and the boy will die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read it again
+      in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from it. It spoke of the
+      dead father coldly, and the father had been the boy's idol. No good woman
+      could have been so heartless. It offered the boy a seat in one of the
+      least reputable of the Paris theaters to hear his mother sing. And in the
+      envelope, overlooked before, Peter found a cutting from a French
+      newspaper, a picture of the music-hall type that made him groan. It was
+      indorsed &ldquo;Mamma.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in order,
+      working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel&mdash;all in order
+      but Peter's room. That was to have a special cleaning later. Next, still
+      with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours with her violin, standing
+      very close to the stove to save fuel and keep her fingers warm. She played
+      well that morning: even her own critical ears were satisfied, and the
+      Portier, repairing a window lock in an empty room below, was entranced. He
+      sat on the window sill in the biting cold and listened. Many music
+      students had lived in the apartment with the great salon; there had been
+      much music of one sort and another, but none like this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She tears my heart from my bosom,&rdquo; muttered the Portier, sighing, and
+      almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter's room. She felt very tender
+      toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer's visit had died away,
+      but there remained a clear vision of Peter standing behind the chair and
+      offering himself humbly in marriage, so that a bad situation might be made
+      better. And as with a man tenderness expresses itself in the giving of
+      gifts, so with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony cleaned Peter's
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was really rather tidy. Peter's few belongings did not spread to any
+      extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the rudiments of order.
+      Harmony took the covers from washstand and dressing table and washed and
+      ironed them. She cleaned Peter's worn brushes and brought a pincushion of
+      her own for his one extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own steamer
+      rug and folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove in the
+      room; it had been Harmony's room once, and she knew to the full how cold
+      it could be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for the inner.
+      She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up, when Anna came home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came somberly
+      back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was making fast that
+      day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Harry,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm going to take a bite and hurry off. Don't
+      bother, I'll attend to myself.&rdquo; She stuffed the letter in her belt and got
+      a plate from a shelf. &ldquo;How pretty you look with your head tied up! If
+      stupid Peter saw you now he would fall in love with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt rather better
+      after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off, was busy over the
+      brick stove. There was nothing said for a moment. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am out of patience with Peter,&rdquo; said Anna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because he hasn't fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Anna!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it's superhuman of
+      Peter. I wonder&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I'll not tell you what I wonder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna's frank speech, did not insist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna's thoughts
+      wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt and back again to
+      Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been suspicious of Peter. From
+      her dozen years of advantage in age and experience she looked down on
+      Peter's thirty years of youth, and thought she knew something that Peter
+      himself did not suspect. Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his
+      heart-searching for him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony
+      and did not himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup,
+      revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and grace, a
+      thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility she and Peter had
+      assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for her letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had rather bad news,&rdquo; she said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. My father&mdash;did you know I have a father?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You hadn't spoken of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never do. As a father he hasn't amounted to much. But he's very ill,
+      and&mdash;I 've a conscience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony turned a startled face to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not going back to America?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and do go
+      I'll find some one to take my place. Don't worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came in, and
+      there was no time to discuss Peter's new complication with her. Harmony
+      and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent. Anna's unfortunate comment
+      about Peter had made her constrained. After the meal Peter, pipe in mouth,
+      carried the dishes to the kitchen, and there it was that he gave her the
+      letter. What Peter's slower mind had been a perceptible time in grasping
+      Harmony comprehended at once&mdash;and not only the situation, but its
+      solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let her have him!&rdquo; she said, putting down the letter. &ldquo;Bring him
+      here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so obvious
+      was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and estrays, banded
+      together against a common poverty, a common loneliness, should share
+      without question whatever was theirs to divide. Peter and Anna gave
+      cheerfully of their substance, Harmony of her labor, that a small boy
+      should be saved a tragic knowledge until he was well enough to bear it, or
+      until, if God so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind. Thus
+      it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials of the
+      Votivkirche showed nine o'clock, he did not notice a cab that halted
+      across the street from the hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of him,
+      carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and insisting
+      on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to say that he
+      had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that it was a short
+      stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was undoubtedly clothing
+      going to the laundry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps&mdash;it is just possible&mdash;the sentry had his suspicions. It
+      is undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with Peter's arm
+      close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going through
+      the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing toward the
+      carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg sulked
+      behind walls of mist. From the little balcony of the Pension Waldheim one
+      looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there by islands that
+      were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were evergreen trees. The
+      roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the horses steamed and
+      sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the barking of a dog
+      loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be seen. Children cried
+      and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain
+      with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain
+      clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the slip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close the heavy
+      wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the room was sticky
+      and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined to the house, grew
+      irritable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender tenure
+      she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither speech nor thought.
+      And the little Marie's love for Stewart, grown to be a part of her, was
+      largely maternal. She held him by mothering him, by keeping him
+      comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have
+      brought him to her in chains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement; he
+      resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her unusual
+      leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire, and
+      stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious
+      thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the night of the second day the weather changed. Marie, awakening
+      early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the door carefully behind
+      her. A new world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering branches, of
+      white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe was become a garment.
+      And from behind the villa came the cheerful sound of sleigh-bells, of
+      horses' feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily along frozen roads.
+      Even the barking of the dog in the next yard had ceased rumbling and
+      become sharp staccato.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The balcony extended round the corner of the house. Marie, eagerly
+      discovering her new world, peered about, and seeing no one near ventured
+      so far. The road was in view, and a small girl on ski was struggling to
+      prevent a collision between two plump feet. Even as Marie saw her the
+      inevitable happened and she went headlong into a drift. A governess who
+      had been kneeling before a shrine by the road hastily crossed herself and
+      ran to the rescue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a marvelous morning, a day of days. The governess and the child
+      went on out of vision. Marie stood still, looking at the shrine. A drift
+      had piled about its foot, where the governess had placed a bunch of Alpine
+      flowers. Down on her knees on the balcony went the little Marie,
+      regardless of the snow, and prayed to the shrine of the Virgin below&mdash;for
+      what? For forgiveness? For a better life? Not at all. She prayed that the
+      heels of the American girl would keep her in out of the snow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prayer of the wicked availeth nothing; even the godly at times must
+      suffer disappointment. And when one prays of heels, who can know of the
+      yearning back of the praying? Marie, rising and dusting her chilled knees,
+      saw the party of Americans on the road, clad in stout boots and swinging
+      along gayly. Marie shrugged her shoulders resignedly. She should have gone
+      to the shrine itself; a balcony was not a holy place. But one thing she
+      determined&mdash;the Americans went toward the Sonnwendstein. She would
+      advise against the Sonnwendstein for that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie's day of days had begun wrong after all. For Stewart rose with the
+      Sonnwendstein in his mind, and no suggestion of Marie's that in another
+      day a path would be broken had any effect on him. He was eager to be off,
+      committed the extravagance of ordering an egg apiece for breakfast, and
+      finally proclaimed that if Marie feared the climb he would go alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie made many delays: she dressed slowly, and must run back to see if
+      the balcony door was securely closed. At a little shop where they stopped
+      to buy mountain sticks she must purchase postcards and send them at once.
+      Stewart was fairly patient: air and exercise were having their effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was eleven o'clock when, having crossed the valley, they commenced to
+      mount the slope of the Sonnwendstein. The climb was easy; the road wound
+      back and forward on itself so that one ascended with hardly an effort.
+      Stewart gave Marie a hand here and there, and even paused to let her sit
+      on a boulder and rest. The snow was not heavy; he showed her the
+      footprints of a party that had gone ahead, and to amuse her tried to count
+      the number of people. When he found it was five he grew thoughtful. There
+      were five in Anita's party. Thanks to Marie's delays they met the
+      Americans coming down. The meeting was a short one: the party went on
+      down, gayly talking. Marie and Stewart climbed silently. Marie's day was
+      spoiled; Stewart had promised to dine at the hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the view at the tourist house did not restore Marie's fallen spirits.
+      What were the Vienna plain and the Styrian Alps to her, with this
+      impatient and frowning man beside her consulting his watch and computing
+      the time until he might see the American again? What was prayer, if this
+      were its answer?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They descended rapidly, Stewart always in the lead and setting a pace that
+      Marie struggled in vain to meet. To her tentative and breathless remarks
+      he made brief answer, and only once in all that time did he volunteer a
+      remark. They had reached the Hotel Erzherzog in the valley. The hotel was
+      still closed, and Marie, panting, sat down on an edge of the terrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have been very foolish,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Being seen together like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why? Could you not walk with any woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not that,&rdquo; said Stewart hastily. &ldquo;I suppose once does not matter.
+      But we can't be seen together all the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie turned white. The time had gone by when an incident of the sort
+      could have been met with scorn or with threats; things had changed for
+      Marie Jedlicka since the day Peter had refused to introduce her to
+      Harmony. Then it had been vanity; now it was life itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you mean,&rdquo; she said with pale lips, &ldquo;is that we must not be seen
+      together at all. Must I&mdash;do you wish me to remain a prisoner while
+      you&mdash;&rdquo; she choked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven's sake,&rdquo; he broke out brutally, &ldquo;don't make a scene. There are
+      men cutting ice over there. Of course you are not a prisoner. You may go
+      where you like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie rose and picked up her muff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie's sordid little tragedy played itself out in Semmering. Stewart
+      neglected her almost completely; he took fewer and fewer meals at the
+      villa. In two weeks he spent one evening with the girl, and was so
+      irritable that she went to bed crying. The little mountain resort was
+      filling up; there were more and more Americans. Christmas was drawing near
+      and a dozen or so American doctors came up, bringing their families for
+      the holidays. It was difficult to enter a shop without encountering some
+      of them. To add to the difficulty, the party at the hotel, finding it
+      crowded there, decided to go into a pension and suggested moving to the
+      Waldheim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart himself was wretchedly uncomfortable. Marie's tragedy was his
+      predicament. He disliked himself very cordially, loathing himself and his
+      situation with the new-born humility of the lover. For Stewart was in love
+      for the first time in his life. Marie knew it. She had not lived with him
+      for months without knowing his every thought, every mood. She grew bitter
+      and hard those days, sitting alone by the green stove in the Pension
+      Waldheim, or leaning, elbows on the rail, looking from the balcony over
+      the valley far below. Bitter and hard, that is, during his absences; he
+      had but to enter the room and her rage died, to be replaced with yearning
+      and little, shy, tentative advances that he only tolerated. Wild thoughts
+      came to Marie, especially at night, when the stars made a crown over the
+      Rax, and in the hotel an orchestra played, while people dined and laughed
+      and loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She grew obstinate, too. When in his desperation Stewart suggested that
+      they go back to Vienna she openly scoffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;That you may come back here to her, leaving me
+      there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear girl,&rdquo; he flung back exasperated, &ldquo;this affair was not a
+      permanent one. You knew that at the start.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have taken me away from my work. I have two months' vacation. It is
+      but one month.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go back and let me pay&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In pursuance of the plan to leave the hotel the American party came to see
+      the Waldheim, and catastrophe almost ensued. Luckily Marie was on the
+      balcony when the landlady flung open the door, and announced it as
+      Stewart's apartment. But Stewart had a bad five minutes and took it out,
+      manlike, on the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart had another reason for not wishing to leave Semmering. Anita was
+      beautiful, a bit of a coquette, too; as are most pretty women. And Stewart
+      was not alone in his devotion. A member of the party, a New Yorker named
+      Adam, was much in love with the girl and indifferent who knew it. Stewart
+      detested him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his despair Stewart wrote to Peter Byrne. It was characteristic of
+      Peter that, however indifferent people might be in prosperity, they always
+      turned to him in trouble. Stewart's letter concluded:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have made out a poor case for myself; but I'm in a hole, as you can
+      see. I would like to chuck everything here and sail for home with these
+      people who go in January. But, confound it, Byrne, what am I to do with
+      Marie? And that brings me to what I 've been wanting to say all along, and
+      haven't had the courage to. Marie likes you and you rather liked her,
+      didn't you? You could talk her into reason if anybody could. Now that you
+      know how things are, can't you come up over Sunday? It's asking a lot, and
+      I know it; but things are pretty bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter received the letter on the morning of the day before Christmas. He
+      read it several times and, recalling the look he had seen more than once
+      in Marie Jedlicka's eyes, he knew that things were very bad, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter was a man of family in those days, and Christmas is a family
+      festival not to be lightly ignored. He wired to Stewart that he would come
+      up as soon as possible after Christmas. Then, because of the look in
+      Marie's eyes and because he feared for her a sad Christmas, full of
+      heartaches and God knows what loneliness, he bought her a most hideous
+      brooch, which he thought admirable in every way and highly ornamental and
+      which he could not afford at all. This he mailed, with a cheery greeting,
+      and feeling happier and much poorer made his way homeward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with the
+      great chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with cranberry eyes
+      for supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree gleaming with candles on
+      the stand, and beside the stand, in a huge chair, Jimmy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had been shopping
+      and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless, with the shops full
+      of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly overburdened. There had been
+      anxieties, too, such as the pig's head, which must be done a certain way,
+      and Jimmy, who must be left with the Portier's wife as nurse while all of
+      them went to the hospital. The house revolved around Jimmy now, Jimmy, who
+      seemed the better for the moving, and whose mother as yet had failed to
+      materialize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as the
+      early twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry kept guard
+      and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground men wandered about,
+      smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving to keep warm,
+      offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, with here and there
+      an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home. The hospital was
+      always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she found it harrowing.
+      Its very size shocked her, that there should be so much suffering, so much
+      that was appalling, frightful, insupportable. Peter felt her quiver under
+      his hand. A hospital in festivity is very affecting. It smiles through its
+      tears. And in every assemblage there are sharply defined lines of
+      difference. There are those who are going home soon, God willing; there
+      are those who will go home some time after long days and longer nights.
+      And there are those who will never go home and who know it. And because of
+      this the ones who are never going home are most festively clad, as if, by
+      way of compensation, the nurses mean to give them all future Christmasses
+      in one. They receive an extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,&mdash;and
+      they are not the less grateful because they understand. And when
+      everything is over they lay away in the bedside stand the gloves they will
+      never wear, and divide the extra orange with a less fortunate one who is
+      almost recovered. Their last Christmas is past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How beautiful the tree was!&rdquo; they say. Or, &ldquo;Did you hear how the children
+      sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think&mdash;of angels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,
+      and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was to
+      play. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon; no
+      one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the
+      nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.
+      Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and
+      wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
+      imposing audience was the result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats
+      rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the roof.
+      In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other illumination
+      in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the rows of hopeful,
+      hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white gowns, the soft
+      rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with the red beard
+      stepped out and began to read an address&mdash;all caught Harmony by the
+      throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt rather than heard
+      her soft sob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through Harmony's
+      eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away, leaving him
+      quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of humanity that he
+      had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be counted. Now, once more,
+      Peter was back in the early days, when a heart was not a pump, but a thing
+      that ached or thrilled or struggled, that loved or hated or yearned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning
+      festivity into gloom. It played Handel's &ldquo;Largo&rdquo;; it threw its whole soul
+      into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor place, that
+      Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep vibration of
+      the cello. Harmony fidgeted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How terrible!&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;To turn their Christmas-Eve into mourning!
+      Stop them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop a German orchestra?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed recitations,
+      gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the patients. Then&mdash;Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous, she
+      knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the candles
+      burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a white coat
+      asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to her
+      accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at first
+      timidly, then lustily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the applause.
+      Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought Peter's, and finding
+      them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as softly the
+      others sang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,&rdquo;&mdash;they sang, with upturned eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in which his
+      poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a Christmas-Eve
+      in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a girl-woman, of a still and
+      holy night, of a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nur das traute, hoch heilige Paar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar Schlaf'
+      in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh',&rdquo; they sang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room, which had
+      been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with a fire
+      all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony brought
+      her small puzzles and together they solved them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall it be a steak to-night?&rdquo; thus Harmony humbly. &ldquo;Or chops?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With tomato sauce?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Peter allows, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fish,&rdquo; he would decide. &ldquo;Fish with egg dressing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement,
+      but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many and bitter were the
+      battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the
+      litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully calculated
+      expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on which he had
+      set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as a luxury. There
+      was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for Peter was spelling
+      itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those days. He resented
+      anything that took him from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was failing.
+      He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones be bygones
+      and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's great prop. What
+      would he do should she decide to go home? He had built his house on the
+      sand, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.
+      Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote letters of marvelous
+      adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured
+      them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of
+      his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. &ldquo;Dad&rdquo; was
+      already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes he
+      called Peter &ldquo;Dad.&rdquo; At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an agony
+      of tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
+      Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the
+      privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All day
+      he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for the
+      tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming only,
+      and sternly forbidden to eat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, with a
+      collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a pair
+      of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage was on his
+      knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake with pink
+      icing. The Portier's gift was a stealthy one, while his wife was having
+      coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of Christmas does
+      strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was roistering in a
+      beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the Portier's wife,
+      puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that only the initiated
+      could open, and when one succeeded at last there was a picture of the
+      Christ-Child within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young McLean came to call that evening&mdash;came to call and remained to
+      worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor had come.
+      McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, was a
+      comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments since the
+      day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the hallmark of respectability on the
+      household, to restore it to something it had lost or had never had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna put Jimmy
+      to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was extinguishing the
+      dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean was at the piano, thrumming
+      softly. Peter, turning round suddenly, surprised an expression on the
+      younger man's face that startled him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For that one night Harmony had laid aside her mourning, and wore white,
+      soft white, tucked in at the neck, short-sleeved, trailing. Peter had
+      never seen her in white before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were always
+      alert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night he was
+      unusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp and watched the
+      two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or that, the girl bending
+      over a string of her violin. Anna came in and sat down near him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boy is quite fascinated,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;Watch his eyes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a nice boy.&rdquo; This from Peter, as if he argued with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As men go!&rdquo; This was a challenge Peter was usually quick to accept. That
+      night he only smiled. &ldquo;It would be a good thing for her: his people are
+      wealthy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem. Eminently
+      it would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in his well-made
+      evening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language of music, who was almost
+      speechless over her playing, and who looked up at her with eyes in which
+      admiration was not unmixed with adoration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the room and
+      took to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each time as he passed the
+      door he tried not to glance in; each time he paused involuntarily.
+      Jealousy had her will of him that night, jealousy, when he had never
+      acknowledged even to himself how much the girl was to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but that
+      night he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the doors. Peter came
+      in and sat with him in the dark, going over now and then to cover him, or
+      to give him a drink, or to pick up the cage of mice which Jimmy insisted
+      on having beside him and which constantly slipped off on to the floor.
+      After a time Peter lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on a cork
+      floating in a saucer of lard oil, and set it on the bedside table. Then
+      round it he arranged Jimmy's treasures, the deer antlers, the cage of
+      mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat in the
+      room, his dead pipe in his teeth, and thought of many things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very late when young McLean left. The two had played until they
+      stopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to bed. From
+      Jimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been awfully good to me,&rdquo; McLean said as he finally rose to go.
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I want you to know that I'll never forget this evening, never.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has been splendid, hasn't it? Since little Scatchy left there has been
+      no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for some one to talk
+      music to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lonely! Poor Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you will let me come back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will I, indeed! I&mdash;I'll be grateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How soon would be proper? I dare say to-morrow you'll be busy&mdash;Christmas
+      and all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean you would like to come to-morrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If old Peter wouldn't be fussed. He might think&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter always wants every one to be happy. So if you really care&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I'll not bore you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How&mdash;about what time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the afternoon would be pleasant, I think. And then Jimmy can listen.
+      He loves music.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean, having found his fur-lined coat, got into it as slowly as
+      possible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in all the
+      dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even then he
+      hesitated, lingered, loath to break up this little world of two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You play wonderfully,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If only something comes of it! It's curious, isn't it, when you think of
+      it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and both of us working
+      our heads off for something that may never pan out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not until
+      after young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was almost word for word
+      what Peter had said to her in the coffee-house the night they met. She
+      thought it very curious, the coincidence, and pondered it, being ignorant
+      of the fact that it is always a matter for wonder when the man meets the
+      woman, no matter where. Nothing is less curious, more inevitable, more
+      amazing. &ldquo;You and I,&rdquo; forsooth, said Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You and I,&rdquo; cried young McLean!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Quite suddenly Peter's house, built on the sand, collapsed. The shock came
+      on Christmas-Day, after young McLean, now frankly infatuated, had been
+      driven home by Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter did it after his own fashion. Harmony, with unflagging enthusiasm,
+      was looking tired. Suggestions to this effect rolled off McLean's back
+      like rain off a roof. Finally Peter gathered up the fur-lined coat, the
+      velours hat, gloves, and stick, and placed them on the piano in front of
+      the younger man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry you must go,&rdquo; said Peter calmly, &ldquo;but, as you say, Miss Wells
+      is tired and there is supper to be eaten. Don't let me hurry you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was at the door as McLean, laughing and protesting, went out.
+      He brought a cablegram for Anna. Peter took it to her door and waited
+      uneasily while she read it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an urgent summons home; the old father was very low. He was calling
+      for her, and a few days or week' would see the end. There were things that
+      must be looked after. The need of her was imperative. With the death the
+      old man's pension would cease and Anna was the bread-winner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna held the paper out to Peter and sat down. Her nervous strength seemed
+      to have deserted her. All at once she was a stricken, elderly woman, with
+      hope wiped out of her face and something nearer resentment than grief in
+      its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has come, Peter,&rdquo; she said dully. &ldquo;I always knew it couldn't last.
+      They've always hung about my neck, and now&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think you must go? Isn't there some way? If things are so bad you
+      could hardly get there in time, and&mdash;you must think of yourself a
+      little, Anna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not thinking of anything else. Peter, I'm an uncommonly selfish
+      woman, but I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite without warning she burst out crying, unlovely, audible weeping that
+      shook her narrow shoulders. Harmony heard the sound and joined them. After
+      a look at Anna she sat down beside her and put a white arm over her
+      shoulders. She did not try to speak. Anna's noisy grief subsided as
+      suddenly as it came. She patted Harmony's hand in mute acknowledgment and
+      dried her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not grieving, child,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I'm only realizing what a selfish
+      old maid I am. I'm crying because I'm a disappointment to myself. Harry,
+      I'm going back to America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that, after hours of discussion, was where they ended. Anna must go at
+      once. Peter must keep the apartment, having Jimmy to look after and to
+      hide. What was a frightful dilemma to him and to Harmony Anna took rather
+      lightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll find some one else to take my place,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If I had a day I
+      could find a dozen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And in the interval?&rdquo; Harmony asked, without looking at Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The interval! Tut! Peter is your brother, to all intents and purposes.
+      And if you are thinking of scandal-mongers, who will know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Having determined to go, no arguments moved Anna, nor could either of the
+      two think of anything to urge beyond a situation she refused to see, or
+      rather a situation she refused to acknowledge. She was not as comfortable
+      as she pretended. During all that long night, while snow sifted down into
+      the ugly yard and made it beautiful, while Jimmy slept and the white mice
+      played, while Harmony tossed and tried to sleep and Peter sat in his cold
+      room and smoked his pipe, Anna packed her untidy belongings and added a
+      name now and then to a list that was meant for Peter, a list of possible
+      substitutes for herself in the little household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She left early the next morning, a grim little person who bent over the
+      sleeping boy hungrily, and insisted on carrying her own bag down the
+      stairs. Harmony did not go to the station, but stayed at home, pale and
+      silent, hovering around against Jimmy's awakening and struggling against a
+      feeling of panic. Not that she feared Peter or herself. But she was
+      conventional; shielded girls are accustomed to lean for a certain support
+      on the proprieties, as bridgeplayers depend on rules.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter came back to breakfast, but ate little. Harmony did not even sit
+      down, but drank her cup of coffee standing, looking down at the snow
+      below. Jimmy still slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you sit down?&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not hungry, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can sit down without eating.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was nervous. To cover his uneasiness he was distinctly gruff. He
+      pulled a chair out for her and she sat down. Now that they were face to
+      face the tension was lessened. Peter laid Anna's list on the table between
+      them and bent over it toward her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are hurting me very much, Harry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do you know why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? I am only sorry about Anna. I miss her. I&mdash;I was fond of her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So was I. But that isn't it, Harry. It's something else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm uncomfortable, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So am I. I'm sorry you don't trust me. For that's it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. But, Peter, what will people say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A great deal, if they know. Who is to know? How many people know about
+      us? A handful, at the most, McLean and Mrs. Boyer and one or two others.
+      Of course I can go away until we get some one to take Anna's place, but
+      you'd be here alone at night, and if the youngster had an attack&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, don't leave him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's holiday time. There are no clinics until next week. If you'll put up
+      with me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put up with you, when it is your apartment I use, your food I eat!&rdquo; She
+      almost choked. &ldquo;Peter, I must talk about money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm coming to that. Don't you suppose you more than earn everything?
+      Doesn't it humiliate me hourly to see you working here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter! Would you rob me of my last vestige of self-respect?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This being unanswerable, Peter fell back on his major premise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you'll put up with me for a day or so I'll take this list of Anna's
+      and hunt up some body. Just describe the person you desire and I'll find
+      her.&rdquo; He assumed a certainty he was far from feeling, but it reassured the
+      girl. &ldquo;A woman, of course?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. And not young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Not young,'&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;Fat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony recalled Mrs. Boyer's ample figure and shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not too stout. And agreeable. That's most important.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Agreeable,'&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;Although Anna was hardly agreeable, in the
+      strict sense of the word, was she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was interesting, and&mdash;and human.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Human!'&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;Wanted, a woman, not young, not too stout,
+      agreeable and human. Shall I advertise?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The strain was quite gone by that time. Harmony was smiling. Jimmy,
+      waking, called for food, and the morning of the first day was under way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was well content that morning, in spite of an undercurrent of
+      uneasiness. Before this Anna had shared his proprietorship with him. Now
+      the little household was his. His vicarious domesticity pleased him. He
+      strutted about, taking a new view of his domain; he tightened a doorknob
+      and fastened a noisy window. He inspected the coal-supply and grumbled
+      over its quality. He filled the copper kettle on the stove, carried in the
+      water for Jimmy's morning bath, cleaned the mouse cage. He even insisted
+      on peeling the little German potatoes, until Harmony cried aloud at his
+      wastefulness and took the knife from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And afterward, while Harmony in the sickroom read aloud and Jimmy put the
+      wooden sentry into the cage to keep order, he got out his books and tried
+      to study. But he did little work. His book lay on his knee, his pipe died
+      beside him. The strangeness of the situation came over him, sitting there,
+      and left him rather frightened. He tried to see it from the viewpoint of
+      an outsider, and found himself incredulous and doubting. McLean would
+      resent the situation. Even the Portier was a person to reckon with. The
+      skepticism of the American colony was a thing to fear and avoid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just manage
+      alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his resources to
+      cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had undertaken to shield
+      a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he would and could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brave thoughts were Peter's that snowy morning in the great salon of Maria
+      Theresa, with the cat of the Portier purring before the fire; brave
+      thoughts, cool reason, with Harmony practicing scales very softly while
+      Jimmy slept, and with Anna speeding through a white world, to the
+      accompaniment of bitter meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had meant to go to Semmering that day, but even the urgency of
+      Marie's need faded before his own situation. He wired Stewart that he
+      would come as soon as he could, and immediately after lunch departed for
+      the club, Anna's list in his pocket, Harmony's requirements in mind. He
+      paused at Jimmy's door on his way out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall it be to-day?&rdquo; he inquired. &ldquo;A postcard or a crayon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I could have a dog.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll have a dog when you are better and can take him walking. Wait until
+      spring, son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some more mice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have them&mdash;but not to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What holiday comes next?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;New Year's Day. Suppose I bring you a New Year's card.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's right,&rdquo; agreed Jimmy. &ldquo;One I can send to Dad. Do you think he will
+      come back this year?&rdquo; wistfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter dropped on his baggy knees beside the bed and drew the little wasted
+      figure to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you'll surely see him this year, old man,&rdquo; he said huskily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter walked to the Doctors' Club. On the way he happened on little
+      Georgiev, the Bulgarian, and they went on together. Peter managed to make
+      out that Georgiev was studying English, and that he desired to know the
+      state of health and the abode of the Fraulein Wells. Peter evaded the
+      latter by the simple expedient of pretending not to understand. The little
+      Bulgarian watched him earnestly, his smouldering eyes not without
+      suspicion. There had been much talk in the Pension Schwarz about the
+      departure together of the three Americans. The Jew from Galicia still
+      raved over Harmony's beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Georgiev rather hoped, by staying by Peter, to be led toward his star. But
+      Peter left him at the Doctors' Club, still amiable, but absolutely obtuse
+      to the question nearest the little spy's heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The club was almost deserted. The holidays had taken many of the members
+      out of town. Other men were taking advantage of the vacation to see the
+      city, or to make acquaintance again with families they had hardly seen
+      during the busy weeks before Christmas. The room at the top of the stairs
+      where the wives of the members were apt to meet for chocolate and to
+      exchange the addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room he
+      found McLean. Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary
+      habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for a
+      dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in Peter's mind to enlist McLean's assistance in his difficulties.
+      McLean knew a good many people. He was popular, goodlooking, and in a
+      colony where, unlike London and Paris, the great majority were people of
+      moderate means, he was conspicuously well off. But he was also much
+      younger than Peter and intolerant with the insolence of youth. Peter was
+      thinking hard as he took off his overcoat and ordered beer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as he saw
+      many things. How far his love might carry him, Peter had no idea. It
+      seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and studied him over his
+      magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly the girl's position, and that
+      when he learned it a crisis might be precipitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of three things might happen: He might bend all his energies to second
+      Peter's effort to fill Anna's place, to find the right person; he might
+      suggest taking Anna's place himself, and insist that his presence in the
+      apartment would be as justifiable as Peter's; or he might do at once the
+      thing Peter felt he would do eventually, cut the knot of the difficulty by
+      asking Harmony to marry him. Peter, greeting him pleasantly, decided not
+      to tell him anything, to keep him away if possible until the thing was
+      straightened out, and to wait for an hour at the club in the hope that a
+      solution might stroll in for chocolate and gossip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In any event explanation to McLean would have required justification.
+      Peter disliked the idea. He could humble himself, if necessary, to a
+      woman; he could admit his asininity in assuming the responsibility of
+      Jimmy, for instance, and any woman worthy of the name, or worthy of living
+      in the house with Harmony, would understand. But McLean was young,
+      intolerant. He was more than that, though Peter, concealing from himself
+      just what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival for what
+      he had never claimed. But a rival the boy was. Peter, calmly reading a
+      magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip of the fiercest
+      jealousy. He turned pages automatically, to recall nothing of what he had
+      read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean, sitting across from him, watched him surreptitiously. Big Peter,
+      aggressively masculine, heavy of shoulder, direct of speech and eye, was
+      to him the embodiment of all that a woman should desire in a man. He, too,
+      was jealous, but humbly so. Unlike Peter he knew his situation, was young
+      enough to glory in it. Shameless love is always young; with years comes
+      discretion, perhaps loss of confidence. The Crusaders were youths,
+      pursuing an idea to the ends of the earth and flaunting a lady's guerdon
+      from spear or saddle-bow. The older men among them tucked the handkerchief
+      or bit of a gauntleted glove under jerkin and armor near the heart, and
+      flung to the air the guerdon of some light o' love. McLean would have
+      shouted Harmony's name from the housetops. Peter did not acknowledge even
+      to himself that he was in love with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to McLean after a time that Peter being in the club, and
+      Harmony being in all probability at home, it might be possible to see her
+      alone for a few minutes. He had not intended to go back to the house in
+      the Siebensternstrasse so soon after being peremptorily put out; he had
+      come to the club with the intention of clinching his resolution with a
+      game of cribbage. But fate was playing into his hands. There was no
+      cribbage player round, and Peter himself sat across deeply immersed in a
+      magazine. McLean rose, not stealthily, but without unnecessary noise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far so good. Peter turned a page and went on reading. McLean sauntered
+      to a window, hands in pockets. He even whistled a trifle, under his
+      breath, to prove how very casual were his intentions. Still whistling, he
+      moved toward the door. Peter turned another page, which was curiously soon
+      to have read two columns of small type without illustrations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once out in the hall McLean's movements gained aim and precision. He got
+      his coat, hat and stick, flung the first over his arm and the second on
+      his head, and&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Going out?&rdquo; asked Peter calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, nothing to do here. I've read all the infernal old magazines until
+      I'm sick of them.&rdquo; Indignant, too, from his tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walking?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mind if I go with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, taking down his old overcoat from its hook, turned and caught the
+      boy's eye. It was a swift exchange of glances, but illuminating&mdash;Peter's
+      whimsical, but with a sort of grim determination; McLean's sheepish, but
+      equally determined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rotten afternoon,&rdquo; said McLean as they started for the stairs. &ldquo;Half
+      rain, half snow. Streets are ankle-deep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not particularly keen about walking, but&mdash;I don't care for this
+      tomb alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing was further from McLean's mind than a walk with Peter that
+      afternoon. He hesitated halfway down the upper flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't care for cribbage, do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't know anything about it. How about pinochle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had both stopped, equally determined, equally hesitating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pinochle it is,&rdquo; acquiesced McLean. &ldquo;I was only going because there was
+      nothing to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Things went very well for Peter that afternoon&mdash;up to a certain
+      point. He beat McLean unmercifully, playing with cold deliberation. McLean
+      wearied, fidgeted, railed at his luck. Peter played on grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The club filled up toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women, wives of
+      members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather attentive before he
+      met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted bow he gave her. And,
+      finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one of the women on Anna's list.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, laying down pairs and marking up score, went over Harmony's
+      requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a woman, not young, not
+      too stout, agreeable and human. She was a large, almost bovinely placid
+      person, not at all reminiscent of Anna. She was neat where Anna had been
+      disorderly, well dressed and breezy against Anna's dowdiness and
+      sharpness. Peter, having totaled the score, rose and looked down at
+      McLean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a nice lad,&rdquo; he said, smiling. &ldquo;Sometime I shall teach you the
+      game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How about a lesson to-night in Seven-Star Street?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-night? Why, I'm sorry. We have an engagement for to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;we&rdquo; was deliberate and cruel. McLean writhed. Also the statement was
+      false, but the boy was spared that knowledge for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things went well. Dr. Jennings was badly off for quarters. She would make
+      a change if she could better herself. Peter drew her off to a corner and
+      stated his case. She listened attentively, albeit not without disapproval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She frankly discredited the altruism of Peter's motives when he told her
+      about Harmony. But as the recital went on she found herself rather
+      touched. The story of Jimmy appealed to her. She scolded and lauded Peter
+      in one breath, and what was more to the point, she promised to visit the
+      house in the Siebensternstrasse the next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So Anna Gates has gone home!&rdquo; she reflected. &ldquo;When?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then the girl is there alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She is very young and inexperienced, and the boy&mdash;it's
+      myocarditis. She's afraid to be left with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she quite alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely, and without funds, except enough for her lessons. Our
+      arrangement was that she should keep the house going; that was her share.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Jennings was impressed. It was impossible to talk to Peter and not
+      believe him. Women trusted Peter always.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've been very foolish, Dr. Byrne,&rdquo; she said as she rose; &ldquo;but you've
+      been disinterested enough to offset that and to put some of us to shame.
+      To-morrow at three, if it suits you. You said the Siebensternstrasse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter went home exultant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Christmas-Day had had a softening effect on Mrs. Boyer. It had opened
+      badly. It was the first Christmas she had spent away from her children,
+      and there had been little of the holiday spirit in her attitude as she
+      prepared the Christmas breakfast. After that, however, things happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, under her plate she had found a frivolous chain and
+      pendant which she had admired. And when her eyes filled up, as they did
+      whenever she was emotionally moved, the doctor had come round the table
+      and put both his arms about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too young for you? Not a bit!&rdquo; he said heartily. &ldquo;You're better-looking
+      then you ever were, Jennie; and if you weren't you're the only woman for
+      me, anyhow. Don't you think I realize what this exile means to you and
+      that you're doing it for me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I don't mind it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you do. To-night we'll go out and make a night of it, shall we?
+      Supper at the Grand, the theater, and then the Tabarin, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She loosened herself from his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall I wear? Those horrible things the children bought me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw 'em away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're not worn at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw them out. Get rid of the things the children got you. Go out
+      to-morrow and buy something you like&mdash;not that I don't like you in
+      anything or without&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frank!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be happy, that's the thing. It's the first Christmas without the family,
+      and I miss them too. But we're together, dear. That's the big thing. Merry
+      Christmas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An auspicious opening, that, to Christmas-Day. And they had carried out
+      the program as outlined. Mrs. Boyer had enjoyed it, albeit a bit horrified
+      at the Christmas gayety at the Tabarin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning, however, she awakened with a keen reaction. Her head
+      ached. She had a sense of taint over her. She was virtue rampant again, as
+      on the day she had first visited the old lodge in the Siebensternstrasse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hardly astonishing that by association of ideas Harmony came into
+      her mind again, a brand that might even yet be snatched from the burning.
+      She had been a bit hasty before, she admitted to herself. There was a
+      woman doctor named Gates, although her address at the club was given as
+      Pension Schwarz. She determined to do her shopping early and then to visit
+      the house in the Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard woman, for all her
+      inflexible morality, and more than once she had had an uneasy memory of
+      Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face the afternoon of her visit. She
+      had been a watchful mother over a not particularly handsome family of
+      daughters. This lovely young girl needed mothering and she had refused it.
+      She would go back, and if she found she had been wrong and the girl was
+      deserving and honest, she would see what could be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day was wretched. The snow had turned to rain. Mrs. Boyer, shopping,
+      dragged wet skirts and damp feet from store to store. She found nothing
+      that she cared for after all. The garments that looked chic in the windows
+      or on manikins in the shops, were absurd on her. Her insistent bosom
+      bulged, straight lines became curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets gaped,
+      collars choked her or shocked her by their absence. In the mirror of Marie
+      Jedlicka, clad in familiar garments that had accommodated themselves to
+      the idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump, rather comely
+      matron. Here before the plate glass of the modiste, under the glare of a
+      hundred lights, side by side with a slim Austrian girl who looked like a
+      willow wand, Mrs. Boyer was grotesque, ridiculous, monstrous. She
+      shuddered. She almost wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was bad preparation for a visit to the Siebensternstrasse. Mrs. Boyer,
+      finding her vanity gone, convinced that she was an absurdity physically,
+      fell back for comfort on her soul. She had been a good wife and mother;
+      she was chaste, righteous. God had been cruel to her in the flesh, but He
+      had given her the spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame wishes not the gown? It is beautiful&mdash;see the embroidery! And
+      the neck may be filled with chiffon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Young woman,&rdquo; she said grimly, &ldquo;I see the embroidery; and the neck may be
+      filled with chiffon, but not for me! And when you have had five children,
+      you will not buy clothes like that either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the kindliness was gone from the visit to the Siebensternstrasse; only
+      the determination remained. Wounded to the heart of her self-esteem, her
+      pride in tatters, she took her way to the old lodge and climbed the
+      stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She found a condition of mild excitement. Jimmy had slept long after his
+      bath. Harmony practiced, cut up a chicken for broth, aired blankets for
+      the chair into which Peter on his return was to lift the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was called to inspect the mouse-cage, which, according to Jimmy, had
+      strawberries in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Far back,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;There in the cotton, Harry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not strawberries. Harmony opened the cage and very tenderly
+      took out the cotton nest. Eight tiny pink baby mice, clean washed by the
+      mother, lay curled in a heap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a stupendous moment. The joy of vicarious parentage was Jimmy's. He
+      named them all immediately and demanded food for them. On Harmony's
+      delicate explanation that this was unnecessary, life took on a new meaning
+      for Jimmy. He watched the mother lest she slight one. His responsibility
+      weighed on him. Also his inquiring mind was very busy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how did they get there?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God sent them, just as he sends babies of all sorts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he send me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a good one on you, Harry. My father found me in a hollow tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don't you think God had something to do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy pondered this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;God sent Daddy to find me so that I would be
+      his little boy. You never happened to see any babies when you were out
+      walking, did you, Harry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in stumps&mdash;but I probably wasn't looking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy eyed her with sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may some day. Would you like to have one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much,&rdquo; said Harmony, and flushed delightfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was disposed to press the matter, to urge immediate maternity on
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could lay it here on the bed,&rdquo; he offered, &ldquo;and I'd watch it. When
+      they yell you let 'em suck your finger. I knew a woman once that had a
+      baby and she did that. And it could watch Isabella.&rdquo; Isabella was the
+      mother mouse. &ldquo;And when I'm better I could take it walking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Harmony gravely, &ldquo;is mighty fine of you, Jimmy boy. I&mdash;I'll
+      think about it.&rdquo; She never denied Jimmy anything, so now she temporized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll ask Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had a half-hysterical moment; then:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wouldn't it be better,&rdquo; she asked, &ldquo;to keep anything of that sort a
+      secret? And to surprise Peter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy loved a secret. He played with it in lieu of other occupation. His
+      uncertain future was sown thick with secrets that would never flower into
+      reality. Thus Peter had shamelessly promised him a visit to the circus
+      when he was able to go, Harmony not to be told until the tickets were
+      bought. Anna had similarly promised to send him from America a pitcher's
+      glove and a baseball bat. To this list of futurities he now added
+      Harmony's baby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony brought in her violin and played softly to him, not to disturb the
+      sleeping mice. She sang, too, a verse that the Big Soprano had been fond
+      of and that Jimmy loved. Not much of a voice was Harmony's, but sweet and
+      low and very true, as became her violinist's ear.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Ah, well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+   Deeply buried from human eyes,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      she sang, her clear eyes luminous.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;And in the hereafter, angels may
+   Roll the stone from its grave away!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer mounted the stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She had
+      snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although that very
+      morning she had detested the suit, her round of shopping had again
+      endeared it to her. She told the Portier in English what she thought of
+      him, and climbed ponderously, pausing at each landing to examine the
+      damage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, having sung Jimmy to sleep, was in the throes of an experiment.
+      She was trying to smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very human young person was Harmony, apt to be exceedingly wretched if
+      her hat were of last year's fashion, anxious to be inconspicuous by doing
+      what every one else was doing, conventional as are the very young, fearful
+      of being an exception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And nearly every one was smoking. Many of the young women whom she met at
+      the master's house had yellowed fingers and smoked in the anteroom; the
+      Big Soprano had smoked; Anna and Scatchy had smoked; in the coffee-houses
+      milliners' apprentices produced little silver mouth-pieces to prevent
+      soiling their pretty lips and smoked endlessly. Even Peter had admitted
+      that it was not a vice, but only a comfortable bad habit. And Anna had
+      left a handful of cigarettes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was not smoking; she was experimenting. Peter and Anna had smoked
+      together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without reasoning it out,
+      Harmony was experimenting toward the end of establishing her relations
+      with Peter still further on friendly and comradely grounds. Two men might
+      smoke together; a man and a woman might smoke together as friends.
+      According to Harmony's ideas, a girl paring potatoes might inspire
+      sentiment, but smoking a cigarette&mdash;never!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not like it. She thought, standing before her little mirror, that
+      she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her lips together, as she
+      had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke in a thin line. She smoked
+      very hard, so that she stood in the center of a gray nimbus. She hated it,
+      but she persisted. Perhaps it grew on one; perhaps, also, if she walked
+      about it would choke her less. She practiced holding the thing between her
+      first and second fingers, and found that easier than smoking. Then she
+      went to the salon where there was more air, and tried exhaling through her
+      nose. It made her sneeze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the sneeze came Mrs. Boyer's ring. Harmony thought very fast. It might
+      be the bread or the milk, but again&mdash;She flung the cigarette into the
+      stove, shut the door, and answered the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer's greeting was colder than she had intended. It put Harmony on
+      the defensive at once, made her uncomfortable. Like all the innocent
+      falsely accused she looked guiltier than the guiltiest. Under Mrs. Boyer's
+      searching eyes the enormity of her situation overwhelmed her. And over
+      all, through salon and passage, hung the damning odor of the cigarette.
+      Harmony, leading the way in, was a sheep before her shearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm calling on all of you,&rdquo; said Mrs. Boyer, sniping. &ldquo;I meant to bring
+      Dr. Boyer's cards for every one, including Dr. Byrne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry. Dr. Byrne is out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Dr. Gates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&mdash;she is away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously changed the subject,
+      requesting a needle and thread to draw the rent together. It had been in
+      Harmony's mind to explain the situation, to show Jimmy to Mrs. Boyer, to
+      throw herself on the older woman's sympathy, to ask advice. But the
+      visitor's attitude made this difficult. To add to her discomfort, through
+      the grating in the stove door was coming a thin thread of smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was, after all, Mrs. Boyer who broached the subject again. She had had
+      a cup of tea, and Harmony, sitting on a stool, had mended the rent so that
+      it could hardly be seen. Mrs. Boyer, softened by the tea and by the
+      proximity of Harmony's lovely head bent over her task, grew slightly more
+      expansive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to tell you something, Miss Wells,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You remember my
+      other visit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfectly.&rdquo; Harmony bent still lower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did you an injustice at that time. I've been sorry ever since. I
+      thought that there was no Dr. Gates. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to deny
+      it. People do things in this wicked city that they wouldn't do at home. I
+      confess I misjudged Peter Byrne. You can give him my apologies, since he
+      won't see me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he isn't here or of course he'd see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; demanded Mrs. Boyer grimly, &ldquo;if Peter Byrne is not here, who has
+      been smoking cigarettes in this room? There is one still burning in that
+      stove!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's hand was forced. She was white as she cut the brown-silk thread
+      and rose to her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that I'd better go back a few weeks, Mrs. Boyer, and
+      tell you a story, if you have time to listen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is disagreeable&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. It is about Peter Byrne and myself, and&mdash;some others. It
+      is really about Peter. Mrs. Boyer, will you come very quietly across the
+      hall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, expecting Heaven knows what, rose with celerity. Harmony led
+      the way to Jimmy's door and opened it. He was still asleep, a wasted small
+      figure on the narrow bed. Beside him the mice frolicked in their cage, the
+      sentry kept guard over Peter's shameless letters from the Tyrol, the
+      strawberry babies wriggled in their cotton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are not going to have him very long,&rdquo; said Harmony softly. &ldquo;Peter is
+      making him happy for a little while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Back in the salon of Maria Theresa she told the whole story. Mrs. Boyer
+      found it very affecting. Harmony sat beside her on a stool and she kept
+      her hand on the girl's shoulder. When the narrative reached Anna's going
+      away, however, she took it away. From that point on she sat
+      uncompromisingly rigid and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you mean to say,&rdquo; she exploded when Harmony had finished, &ldquo;that you
+      intend to stay on here, just the two of you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Jimmy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah! What has the child to do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will find some one to take Anna's place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt it. And until you do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing wicked in what we are doing. Don't you see, Mrs. Boyer,
+      I can't leave the boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since Peter is so altruistic, let him hire a nurse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bad as things were, Harmony smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A nurse!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Why, do you realize that he is keeping three people
+      now on what is starvation for one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he's a fool!&rdquo; Mrs. Boyer rose in majesty. &ldquo;I'm not going to leave
+      you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry. You must see&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see nothing but a girl deliberately putting herself in a compromising
+      portion and worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Boyer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get your things on. I guess Dr. Boyer and I can look after you until we
+      can send you home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not going home&mdash;yet,&rdquo; said poor Harmony, biting her lip to
+      steady it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Back and forth waged the battle, Mrs. Boyer assailing, Harmony offering
+      little defense but standing firm on her refusal to go as long as Peter
+      would let her remain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means so much to me,&rdquo; she ventured, goaded. &ldquo;And I earn my lodging and
+      board. I work hard and&mdash;I make him comfortable. It costs him very
+      little and I give him something in exchange. All men are not alike. If the
+      sort you have known are&mdash;are different&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was unfortunate. Mrs. Boyer stiffened. She ceased offensive tactics,
+      and retired grimly into the dignity of her high calling of virtuous wife
+      and mother. She washed her hands of Harmony and Peter. She tied on her
+      veil with shaking hands, and prepared to leave Harmony to her fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me your mother's address,&rdquo; she demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You absolutely refuse to save yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to save
+      myself from, Mrs. Boyer&mdash;uncharitable people, and&mdash;and cruel
+      people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Meaning me!&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;My dear child, people are always cruel who
+      try to save us from ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna's specious arguments must pop into her
+      head at that instant and demand expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old standards
+      have gone. It is what one's conscience condemns that is wrong, isn't it?
+      Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit the average, not the
+      exception.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna! Anna!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are impossible!&rdquo; she snapped. &ldquo;After all, I believe it is Peter who
+      needs protection! I shall speak to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone. But if
+      you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon YOU, keep your
+      views to yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy's room and sank on
+      her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the coverlet; she dared
+      not touch it for fear of waking him&mdash;but she laid her cheek close to
+      it for comfort. When Peter came in, much later, he found the boy wide
+      awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think she's been crying,&rdquo; Jimmy whispered. &ldquo;She's been sobbing in her
+      sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club. It was
+      typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
+      there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings.
+      Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy
+      of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and
+      fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt.
+      He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a
+      magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and really
+      in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and Harmony were
+      not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and the reception
+      room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in which he and
+      Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter to scowl over
+      his books at them, a future in which life was one long piano-violin duo,
+      with the candles in the chandelier going out one by one, leaving them at
+      last alone in scented darkness together&mdash;McLean heard nothing until
+      the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating
+      taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment that
+      Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation was a
+      little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with a
+      stifled oath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is exactly as I tell you,&rdquo; she was saying. &ldquo;If Peter Byrne is trying
+      to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been
+      there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the
+      club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one
+      thing remains, she is not there now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found a
+      &ldquo;comfortable&rdquo; at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage.
+      McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him. The
+      cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of protests
+      from its frantic passenger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence that
+      afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He had
+      thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew it now
+      in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that maddened him:
+      the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress in Peter's voice
+      when he spoke to the girl, Peter's steady eyes in the semi-gloom of the
+      salon while Harmony played.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed,
+      bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for
+      half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the girl
+      first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a madman. Peter
+      was already there; his footprints were fresh in the slush of the path. The
+      house door was closed but not locked. McLean ran up the stairs. It was
+      barely twilight outside, but the staircase well was dark. At the upper
+      landing he was compelled to fumble for the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the salon came a
+      glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and furious, faced Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see Harmony,&rdquo; he said without preface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when the bell
+      rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs. Boyer's visit. In
+      the second between the peal of the bell and his opening the door he had
+      decided what to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much shorter as
+      slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the kitchen, I think. Come into the salon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean flung off his coat. Peter closed the door behind him and stood just
+      inside. He had his pipe as usual. &ldquo;I came to see her, not you, Byrne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I gather. I'll let you see her, of course, but don't you want to see
+      me first?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to take her away from here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? Are you better able to care for her than I am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean stood rigid. He had thrust his clenched hands into his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a scoundrel, Byrne,&rdquo; he said steadily. &ldquo;Why didn't you tell me
+      this this afternoon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I knew if I did you'd do just what you are doing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to keep her here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter changed color at the thrust, but he kept himself in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not keeping her here,&rdquo; he said patiently. &ldquo;I'm doing the best I can
+      under the circumstances.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then your best is pretty bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps. If you would try to remember the circumstances, McLean,&mdash;that
+      the girl has no place else to go, practically no money, and that I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember one circumstance, that you are living here alone with her and
+      that you're crazy in love with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That has nothing to do with you. As long as I treat her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you be good enough to let me finish what I am trying to say? She's
+      safe with me. When I say that I mean it. She will not go away from here
+      with you or with any one else if I can prevent it. And if you care enough
+      about her to try to keep her happy you'll not let her know you have been
+      here. I've got a woman coming to take Anna's place. That ought to satisfy
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Jennings?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She'll not come. Mrs. Boyer has been talking to her. Inside of an hour
+      the whole club will have it&mdash;every American in Vienna will know about
+      it in a day or so. I tell you, Byrne, you're doing an awful thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter drew a long breath. He had had his bad half-hour before McLean came;
+      had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony trying to smile, see her
+      dragging about, languid and white, see her tragic attempts to greet him on
+      the old familiar footing. Through it all he had been sustained by the
+      thought that a day or two days would see the old footing reestablished,
+      another woman in the house, life again worth the living and Harmony
+      smiling up frankly into his eyes. Now this hope had departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't keep me from seeing her, you know,&rdquo; McLean persisted. &ldquo;I've got
+      to put this thing to her. She's got to choose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What alternative have you to suggest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd marry her if she'd have me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After all Peter had expected that. And, if she cared for the boy wouldn't
+      that be best for her? What had he to offer against that? He couldn't
+      marry. He could only offer her shelter, against everything else. Even then
+      he did not dislike McLean. He was a man, every slender inch of him, this
+      boy musician. Peter's heart sank, but he put down his pipe and turned to
+      the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll call her,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But, since this concerns me very vitally, I
+      should like to be here while you put the thing to her. After that if you
+      like&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He called Harmony. She had given Jimmy his supper and was carrying out a
+      tray that seemed hardly touched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He won't eat to-night,&rdquo; she said miserably. &ldquo;Peter, if he stops eating,
+      what can we do? He is so weak!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, took the tray from her gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harry dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I want you to come into the salon. Some one wishes
+      to speak to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Harry, do you remember that evening in the kitchen when&mdash;Do you
+      recall what I promised?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure you know what I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right, then. McLean wants to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, looking up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;McLean? You look so grave, Peter. What is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will tell you. Nothing alarming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter gave McLean a minute alone after all, while he carried the tray to
+      the kitchen. He had no desire to play watchdog over the girl, he told
+      himself savagely; only to keep himself straight with her and to save her
+      from McLean's impetuosity. He even waited in the kitchen to fill and light
+      his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean had worked himself into a very fair passion. He was intense, almost
+      theatrical, as he stood with folded arms waiting for Harmony. So entirely
+      did the girl fill his existence that he forgot, or did not care to
+      remember, how short a time he had known her. As Harmony she dominated his
+      life and his thoughts; as Harmony he addressed her when, rather startled,
+      she entered the salon and stood just inside the closed door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter said you wanted to speak to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean groaned. &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is always Peter. Look here, Harmony,
+      you cannot stay here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is only for a few hours. To-morrow some one is coming. And, anyhow,
+      Peter is going to Semmering. We know it is unusual, but what can we do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unusual! It's&mdash;it's damnable. It's the appearance of the thing,
+      don't you see that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it is rather silly to talk of appearance when there is no one to
+      care. And how can I leave? Jimmy needs me all the time&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's another idiocy of Peter's. What does he mean by putting you in
+      this position?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am one of Peter's idiocies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter entered on that. He took in the situation with a glance, and Harmony
+      turned to him; but if she had expected Peter to support her, she was
+      disappointed. Whatever decision she was to make must be her own, in
+      Peter's troubled mind. He crossed the room and stood at one of the
+      windows, looking out, a passive participant in the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day had been a trying one for Harmony. What she chose to consider
+      Peter's defection was a fresh stab. She glanced from McLean, flushed and
+      excited, to Peter's impassive back. Then she sat down, rather limp, and
+      threw out her hands helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I to do?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;Every one comes with cruel things to
+      say, but no one tells me what to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned away from the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can leave here,&rdquo; ventured McLean. &ldquo;That's the first thing. After that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and after that, what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean glanced at Peter. Then he took a step toward the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could marry me, Harmony,&rdquo; he said unsteadily. &ldquo;I hadn't expected to
+      tell you so soon, or before a third person.&rdquo; He faltered before Harmony's
+      eyes, full of bewilderment. &ldquo;I'd be very happy if you&mdash;if you could
+      see it that way. I care a great deal, you see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed hours to Peter before she made any reply, and that her voice
+      came from miles away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it really as bad as that?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Have I made such a mess of
+      things that some one, either you or Peter, must marry me to straighten
+      things out? I don't want to marry any one. Do I have to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly you don't have to,&rdquo; said Peter. There was relief in his voice,
+      relief and also something of exultation. &ldquo;McLean, you mean well, but
+      marriage isn't the solution. We were getting along all right until our
+      friends stepped in. Let Mrs. Boyer howl all over the colony; there will be
+      one sensible woman somewhere to come and be comfortable here with us. In
+      the interval we'll manage, unless Harmony is afraid. In that case&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Afraid of what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men exchanged glances, McLean helpless, Peter triumphant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not care what Mrs. Boyer says, at least not much. And I am not
+      afraid of anything else at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean picked up his overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At least,&rdquo; he appealed to Peter, &ldquo;you'll come over to my place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; said Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean made a final appeal to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If this gets out,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you are going to regret it all your life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall have nothing to regret,&rdquo; she retorted proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had Peter not been there McLean would have made a better case, would have
+      pleaded with her, would have made less of a situation that roused her
+      resentment and more of his love for her. He was very hard hit, very young.
+      He was almost hysterical with rage and helplessness; he wanted to slap
+      her, to take her in his arms. He writhed under the restraint of Peter's
+      steady eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got to the door and turned, furious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it's up to you,&rdquo; he flung at Peter. &ldquo;You're old enough to know
+      better; she isn't. And don't look so damned superior. You're human, like
+      the rest of us. And if any harm comes to her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here unexpectedly Peter held out his hand, and after a sheepish moment
+      McLean took it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, old man,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;And&mdash;don't be an ass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean knew
+      what in his heart he had known all along&mdash;that the girl was safe
+      enough; that all that was to fear was the gossip of scandal-lovers. He
+      took Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony stood before her very erect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I've said too much; I always do,&rdquo; he said contritely. &ldquo;But you
+      know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am only sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic moment for
+      him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door and down the dark
+      stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax, after all that, to have Peter
+      discover he had gone without his hat and toss it down to him a flight
+      below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between Harmony and
+      Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked during the meal of
+      careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and Peter's proposed trip to
+      Semmering, avoided each other's eyes, ate little or nothing. Once when
+      Harmony passed Peter his coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between
+      them they dropped the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns, Peter
+      wretched and silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from
+      Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days. In two
+      days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some one else. In two
+      days some of the restraint would have worn off. Things would never be the
+      same, but they would be forty-eight hours better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading aloud to
+      him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a valise for the next
+      day's journey and counted out into an envelope half of the money he had
+      with him. This he labeled &ldquo;Household Expenses&rdquo; and set it up on his table,
+      leaning against his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony about. The
+      salon was dark except for the study lamp turned down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers
+      and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the landing; Peter
+      carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles on Jimmy's stand and
+      wrote full directions for every emergency he could imagine. Then, finding
+      it still only nine o'clock, he turned up the lamp in the salon and wrote
+      an exciting letter from Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb, wandering on
+      the mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and carried down
+      into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because he stood so in
+      loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable that before long Jimmy
+      would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and, of course, because it had been
+      a trying day all through, Peter's lips were none too steady as he folded
+      up the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and closed
+      the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to feel his way
+      through the room. It touched a little sweater coat of Harmony's, hanging
+      over the back of a chair. Peter picked it up in a very passion of
+      tenderness and held it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Little girl!&rdquo; he choked. &ldquo;My little girl! God help me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to find that
+      the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could rouse such a storm
+      in him. It made him pause. He put down the coat and pulled himself up
+      sharply. McLean was right; he was only human stuff, very poor human stuff.
+      He put the little coat down hastily, only to lift it again gently to his
+      lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, dear,&rdquo; he whispered. &ldquo;Goodnight, Harmony.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and supper
+      that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor pension.
+      They came to make inquiries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of the
+      bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still lacked an
+      occupant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly
+      medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of
+      language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life are
+      gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual
+      disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised
+      eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of
+      Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter
+      was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The women were also wicked,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Of a man what does one expect?
+      But of a woman! And the younger one looked&mdash;Herr Gott! She had the
+      eyes of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of
+      them left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The
+      Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he so
+      to me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says,&rdquo; interpreted Dr. Jennings, &ldquo;that they were a bad lot&mdash;that
+      the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on
+      the other woman's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What an escape for you!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If you had gone there to live and
+      then found the establishment&mdash;queer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.
+      Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;American ladies!&rdquo; said Olga. &ldquo;Two, old and fat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More hot water!&rdquo; growled Katrina. &ldquo;Why do not the Americans stay in their
+      own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne
+      and the others!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of a certainty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then let me to the door!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says&mdash;how she is
+      wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she sent
+      them all away. Here, take the door!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the
+      dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having
+      retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best forgotten
+      or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a slovenly girl
+      in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her head. &ldquo;The Frau
+      Schwarz is wrong,&rdquo; cried Olga passionately in Vienna dialect. &ldquo;They were
+      good, all of them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What in the world&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr Georgiev
+      eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Jennings was puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wishes to know where the girl lives,&rdquo; she interpreted to Mrs. Boyer.
+      &ldquo;A man wishes to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally!&rdquo; said Mrs. Boyer. &ldquo;Well, don't tell her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to be
+      told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev,
+      Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were
+      inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a
+      gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says,&rdquo; she interpreted as they walked on, &ldquo;that Dr. Peter&mdash;by
+      which I suppose she means Dr. Byrne&mdash;has left a necktie, and that
+      she'll be in hot water if she does not return it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Boyer sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In love with him, probably, like the others!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very early and
+      without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying diagonally across his
+      small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets. The communicating door into
+      Harmony's room was open. Peter kept his eyes carefully from it, but his
+      ears were less under control. He could hear her soft breathing. There were
+      days coming when Peter would stand where he stood then and listen, and
+      find only silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully behind him
+      and lighting a match to find his way down the staircase. The Portier was
+      not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and to stand by while he donned the
+      trousers which he deemed necessary to the dignity of his position before
+      he opened the street door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter. The dawn
+      grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The hurrying crowds
+      at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his coffee, taken from a bare
+      table in the station. The horizontal morning sunlight, shining in through
+      marvelously clean windows, warmed the marble of the floor, made black
+      shadows beside the heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into gold the
+      hair of a toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The same morning
+      light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of one of his shoes.
+      Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at the bits of dust that
+      floated in the sunshine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a passing
+      thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it lasted Peter was a
+      king. Everything was well. The world was his oyster. Life was his, to make
+      it what he would&mdash;youth and hope and joy. Under the beatific
+      influence he expanded, grew, almost shone. Youth and hope and joy&mdash;that
+      cometh in the morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ecstasy passed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer shone; he
+      still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and hugged it. He hunted
+      out a beggar he had passed and gave him five Hellers. He helped a
+      suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered bundle; he called the guard
+      on the train &ldquo;son&rdquo; and forced a grin out of that dignitary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter traveled third-class, which was quite comfortable, and no bother
+      about &ldquo;Nicht Rauchen&rdquo; signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness persisted as
+      far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing ruggedness of the scenery and
+      his first view of the Raxalpe, came recollection of the urgency of
+      Stewart's last message, of Marie Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy
+      that awaited him at the end of his journey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected. Love was a
+      blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in his corner
+      and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he recalled the
+      look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when she looked at
+      Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little thing. If only
+      she'd had a chance!&mdash;Why wasn't he rich enough to help the ones who
+      needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no one the wiser,
+      and make her way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!&rdquo; Peter reflected. &ldquo;Poor little
+      guttersnipe!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather was beautiful. The sleet of the previous day in Vienna had
+      been a deep snowfall on the mountains. The Schwarza was frozen, the castle
+      of Liechtenstein was gray against a white world. A little pilgrimage
+      church far below seemed snowed in against the faithful. The third-class
+      compartment filled with noisy skiing parties. The old woman opened her
+      oilcloth bundle, and taking a cat out of a box inside fed it a sausage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up and up, past the Weinzettelwand and the Station Breitenstein, across
+      the highest viaduct, the Kalte Rinne, and so at last to Semmering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glow had died at last for Peter. He did not like his errand, was very
+      vague, indeed, as to just what that errand might be. He was stiff and
+      rather cold. Also he thought the cat might stifle in the oilcloth, but the
+      old woman too clearly distrusted him to make it possible to interfere.
+      Anyhow, he did not know the German for either cat or oilcloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This made him
+      vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know Stewart well enough to
+      know whether he was punctilious in such matters or not: as a matter of
+      fact he hardly knew him at all. It was because he had appealed to him that
+      Peter was there, it being only necessary to Peter to be needed, and he was
+      anywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his valise
+      and started up&mdash;first long flights of steps through the pines, then a
+      steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he met groups coming
+      down, men that he thought probably American, pretty women in &ldquo;tams&rdquo; and
+      sweaters. He watched for Marie, but there was no sign of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he turned in at
+      the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people following it, coming
+      toward him. It was a singularly silent party. Peter, with his hand on the
+      door-knocker, watched its approach with some curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round it. Even
+      then Peter did not understand. He did not understand until he saw Stewart,
+      limp and unconscious, lifted out of the straw and carried toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery. And
+      Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
+      possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for Stewart,
+      of publicity that would mean an end to the situation. But every inch of
+      her soul was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down,
+      and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree
+      tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps
+      even not yet dead&mdash;that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time
+      and suffer!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
+      threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter, it had
+      been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But there was this
+      difference, whereas before he had drawn her back from the window and
+      clapped her into sanity, now he let her alone. At the end of one of their
+      quarrels she had flung out on to the balcony, and then had watched him
+      through the opening in the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over the
+      mountain roads, seldom alone with Anita, but always near her. He left
+      Marie sulking or sewing, as the case might be. He returned in the evening
+      to find her still sulking, still sewing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Marie did not sulk all day, or sew. She too was out, never far from
+      Stewart, always watching. Many times she escaped discovery only by a
+      miracle, as when she stooped behind an oxcart, pretending to tie her shoe,
+      or once when they all met face to face, and although she lowered her veil
+      Stewart must have known her instantly had he not been so intent on helping
+      Anita over a slippery gutter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She planned a dozen forms of revenge and found them impossible of
+      execution. Stewart himself was frightfully unhappy. For the first time in
+      his life he was really in love, with all the humility of the condition.
+      There were days when he would not touch Anita's hand, when he hardly
+      spoke, when the girl herself would have been outraged at his conduct had
+      she not now and then caught him watching her, seen the wretchedness in his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The form of Marie's revenge was unpremeditated, after all. The light
+      mountain snow was augmented by a storm; roads were ploughed through early
+      in the morning, leaving great banks on either side. Sleigh-bells were
+      everywhere. Coasting parties made the steep roads a menace to the
+      pedestrian; every up-climbing sleigh carried behind it a string of sleds,
+      going back to the starting-point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Below the hotel was the Serpentine Coast, a long and dangerous course,
+      full of high-banked curves, of sudden descents, of long straightaway
+      dashes through the woodland. Two miles, perhaps three, it wound its
+      tortuous way down the mountain. Up by the highroad to the crest again,
+      only a mile or less. Thus it happened that the track was always clear,
+      except for speeding sleds. No coasters, dragging sleds back up the slide,
+      interfered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The track was crowded. Every minute a sled set out, sped down the
+      straightaway, dipped, turned, disappeared. A dozen would be lined up,
+      waiting for the interval and the signal. And here, watching from the porch
+      of the church, in the very shadow of the saints, Marie found her revenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart had given her a little wrist watch. Stewart and Anita were twelfth
+      in line. By the watch, then, twelve minutes down the mountain-side,
+      straight down through the trees to a curve that Marie knew well, a bad
+      curve, only to be taken by running well up on the snowbank. Beyond the
+      snowbank there was a drop, fifteen feet, perhaps more, into the yard of a
+      Russian villa. Stewart and Anita were twelfth; a man in a green
+      stocking-cap was eleventh. The hillside was steep. Marie negotiated it by
+      running from tree to tree, catching herself, steadying for a second, then
+      down again. Once she fell and rolled a little distance. There was no time
+      to think; perhaps had she thought she would have weakened. She had no real
+      courage, only desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she reached the track the man in the green stocking-cap was in sight. A
+      minute and a half she had then, not more. She looked about her hastily. A
+      stone might serve her purpose, almost anything that would throw the sled
+      out of its course. She saw a tree branch just above the track and dragged
+      at it frantically. Some one was shouting at her from an upper window of
+      the Russian villa. She did not hear. Stewart and Anita had made the curve
+      above and were coming down at frantic speed. Marie stood, her back to the
+      oncoming rush of the sled, swaying slightly. When she could hear the
+      singing of the runners she stooped and slid the tree branch out against
+      the track.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had acted almost by instinct, but with devilish skill. The sled swung
+      to one side up the snowbank, and launched itself into the air. Marie heard
+      the thud and the silence that followed it. Then she turned and scuttled
+      like a hunted thing up the mountain side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter put in a bad day. Marie was not about, could not be located.
+      Stewart, suffering from concussion, lay insensible all day and all of the
+      night. Peter could find no fracture, but felt it wise to get another
+      opinion. In the afternoon he sent for a doctor from the Kurhaus and
+      learned for the first time that Anita had also been hurt&mdash;a broken
+      arm. &ldquo;Not serious,&rdquo; said the Kurhaus man. &ldquo;She is brave, very brave, the
+      young woman. I believe they are engaged?&rdquo; Peter said he did not know and
+      thought very hard. Where was Marie? Not gone surely. Here about him lay
+      all her belongings, even her purse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward evening Stewart showed some improvement. He was not conscious, but
+      he swallowed better and began to toss about. Peter, who had had a long day
+      and very little sleep the night before, began to look jaded. He would have
+      sent for a nurse from the Kurhaus, but he doubted Stewart's ability to
+      stand any extra financial strain, and Peter could not help any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The time for supper passed, and no Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The landlady sent up a tray to Peter, stewed meat and potatoes, a salad,
+      coffee. Peter sat in a corner with his back to Stewart and ate ravenously.
+      He had had nothing since the morning's coffee. After that he sat down
+      again by the bed to watch. There was little to do but watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meal had made him drowsy. He thought of his pipe. Perhaps if he got
+      some fresh air and a smoke! He remembered the balcony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was there on the balcony that he found Marie, a cowering thing that
+      pushed his hands away when he would have caught her and broke into
+      passionate crying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot! I cannot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cannot what?&rdquo; demanded Peter gently, watching her. So near was the
+      balcony rail!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throw myself over. I've tried, Peter. I cannot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think not!&rdquo; said Peter sternly. &ldquo;Just now when we need you, too!
+      Come in and don't be a foolish child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Marie would not go in. She held back, clinging tight to Peter's big
+      hand, moaning out in the dialect of the people that always confused him
+      her story of the day, of what she had done, of watching Stewart brought
+      back, of stealing into the house and through an adjacent room to the
+      balcony, of her desperation and her cowardice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was numb with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, quite childish, helpless.
+      Peter stood out on the balcony with his arm round her, while the night
+      wind beat about them, and pondered what was best to do. He thought she
+      might come in and care for Stewart, at least, until he was conscious. He
+      could get her some supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I was seen. They are searching for me now. Oh,
+      Peter! Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is searching for you? Who saw you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The people in the Russian villa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did they see your face?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wore a veil. I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then come in and change your clothes. There is a train down at midnight.
+      You can take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This raised a delicate question. Marie absolutely refused to take
+      Stewart's money. She had almost none of her own. And there were other
+      complications&mdash;where was she to go? The family of the injured girl
+      did not suspect her since they did not know of her existence. She might
+      get away without trouble. But after that, what?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter pondered this on the balcony, while Marie in the bedroom was
+      changing her clothing, soaked with a day in the snow. He came to the
+      inevitable decision, the decision he knew at the beginning that he was
+      going to make.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could only put it up to Harmony first!&rdquo; he reflected. &ldquo;But she will
+      understand when I tell her. She always understands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing there on the little balcony, with tragedy the thickness of a pine
+      board beyond him, Peter experienced a bit of the glow of the morning, as
+      of one who stumbling along in a dark place puts a hand on a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went into the room. Stewart was lying very still and breathing easily.
+      On her knees beside the bed knelt Marie. At Peter's step she rose and
+      faced him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am leaving him, Peter, for always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said Peter heartily. &ldquo;Better for you and better for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie drew a long breath. &ldquo;The night train,&rdquo; she said listlessly, &ldquo;is an
+      express. I had forgotten. It is double fare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What of that, little sister?&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;What is a double fare when it
+      means life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And there will be
+      happiness, little sister.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Portier was almost happy that morning. For one thing, he had won
+      honorable mention at the Schubert Society the night before; for another,
+      that night the Engel was to sing Mignon, and the Portier had spent his
+      Christmas tips for a ticket. All day long he had been poring over the
+      score.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen?'&rdquo; he sang with feeling while
+      he polished the floors. He polished them with his feet, wearing felt boots
+      for the purpose, and executing in the doing a sort of ungainly dance&mdash;a
+      sprinkle of wax, right foot forward and back, left foot forward and back,
+      both feet forward and back in a sort of double shuffle; more wax, more
+      vigorous polishing, more singing, with longer pauses for breath. &ldquo;'Knowest
+      thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'&rdquo; he bellowed&mdash;sprinkle of
+      wax, right foot, left foot, any foot at all. Now and then he took the
+      score from his pocket and pored over it, humming the air, raising his
+      eyebrows over the high notes, dropping his chin to the low ones. It was a
+      wonderful morning. Between greetings to neighbors he sang&mdash;a bit of
+      talk, a bit of song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Kennst du das Land'&mdash;Good-morning, sir&mdash;the old Rax wears a
+      crown. It will snow soon. 'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen'&mdash;Ah,
+      madam the milk Frau, and are the cows frozen up to-day like the pump? No?
+      Marvelous! Dost thou know that to-night is Mignon at the Opera, and that
+      the Engel sings? 'Kennst du das Land'&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At eleven came Rosa with her husband, the soldier from Salzburg with one
+      lung. He was having a holiday from his sentry duty at the hospital, and
+      the one lung seemed to be a libel, for while the women had coffee together
+      and a bit of mackerel he sang a very fair bass to the Portier's tenor.
+      Together they pored over the score, and even on their way to the beer hall
+      hummed together such bits as they recalled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On one point they differed. The score was old and soiled with much
+      thumbing. At one point, destroyed long since, the sentry sang A sharp: the
+      Portier insisted on A natural. They argued together over three Steins of
+      beer; the waiter, referred to, decided for A flat. It was a serious matter
+      to have one's teeth set, as one may say, for a natural and then to be
+      shocked with an unexpected half-tone up or down! It destroyed the
+      illusion; it disappointed; it hurt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sentry stuck to the sharp&mdash;it was sung so at the Salzburg opera.
+      The Portier snapped his thumb at the Salzburg opera. Things were looking
+      serious; they walked back to the locale in silence. The sentry coughed.
+      Possibly there was something, after all, in the one-lung rumor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then that the Portier remembered Harmony. She would know; perhaps
+      she had the score.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was having a bad morning. She had slept little until dawn, and
+      Peter's stealthy closing of the outer door had wakened her by its very
+      caution. After that there had been no more sleep. She had sat up in bed
+      with her chin in her hands and thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the pitiless dawn, with no Peter to restore her to cheerfulness, things
+      looked black, indeed. To what had she fallen, that first one man and then
+      another must propose marriage to her to save her. To save her from what?
+      From what people thought, or&mdash;each from the other?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Were men so evil that they never trusted each other? McLean had frankly
+      distrusted Peter, had said so. Or could it be that there was something
+      about her, something light and frivolous? She had been frivolous. She
+      always laughed at Peter's foolishnesses. Perhaps that was it. That was it.
+      They were afraid for her. She had thrown herself on Peter's hands&mdash;almost
+      into his arms. She had made this situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She must get away, of course. If only she had some one to care for Jimmy
+      until Peter returned! But there was no one. The Portier's wife was fond of
+      Jimmy, but not skillful. And suppose he were to wake in the night and call
+      for her and she would not come. She cried a little over this. After a time
+      she pattered across the room in her bare feet and got from a bureau drawer
+      the money she had left. There was not half enough to take her home. She
+      could write; the little mother might get some for her, but at infinite
+      cost, infinite humiliation. That would have to be a final, desperate
+      resort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt a little more cheerful when she had had a cup of coffee. Jimmy
+      wakened about that time, and she went through the details of his morning
+      toilet with all the brightness she could assume&mdash;bath blankets, warm
+      bath, toenails, finger-nails, fresh nightgown, fresh sheets, and&mdash;final
+      touch of all&mdash;a real barber's part straight from crown to brow. After
+      that ten minutes under extra comforters while the room aired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hung over the boy that morning in an agony of tenderness&mdash;he was
+      so little, so frail, and she must leave him. Only one thing sustained her.
+      The boy loved her, but it was Peter he idolized. When he had Peter he
+      needed nothing else. In some curious process of his childish mind Peter
+      and Daddy mingled in inextricable confusion. More than once he had
+      recalled events in the roving life he and his father had led.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You remember that, don't you?&rdquo; he would say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly I remember,&rdquo; Peter would reply heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That evening on the steamer when I ate so many raisins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. And were ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not ill&mdash;not that time. But you said I'd make a good pudding! You
+      remember that, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Peter would recall it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter would be left. That was the girl's comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a beginning at gathering her things together that morning, while
+      the boy dozed and the white mice scurried about the little cage. She could
+      not take her trunk, or Peter would trace it. She would have to carry her
+      belongings, a few at a time, to wherever she found a room. Then when Peter
+      came back she could slip away and he would never find her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At noon came the Portier and the sentry, now no longer friends, and rang
+      the doorbell. Harmony was rather startled. McLean and Mrs. Boyer had been
+      her only callers, and she did not wish to see either of them. But after a
+      second ring she gathered her courage in her hands and opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned pale when she saw the sentry in his belted blue-gray tunic and
+      high cap. She thought, of course, that Jimmy had been traced and that now
+      he would be taken away. If the sentry knew her, however, he kept his face
+      impassive and merely touched his cap. The Portier stated their errand.
+      Harmony's face cleared. She even smiled as the Portier extended to her the
+      thumbed score with its missing corner. What, after all, does it matter
+      which was right&mdash;whether it was A sharp or A natural? What really
+      matters is that Harmony, having settled the dispute and clinched the
+      decision by running over the score for a page or two, turned to find the
+      Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on paunch, enjoying a
+      delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where,
+      taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders back,
+      arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with amazing
+      rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the little boy
+      in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth, and eyes
+      seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with one another.
+      When all was over&mdash;perhaps when his repertoire was exhausted&mdash;the
+      sentry returned his nose to the center of his face, replaced eyes and
+      mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton handkerchief. Then, still
+      in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving the youngster enraptured,
+      staring at the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the higher
+      part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were many unpretentious
+      buildings. She had hunted board there and she knew. It was far from the
+      Stadt, far from the fashionable part of town, a neighborhood of small
+      shops, of frank indigence. There surely she could find a room, and perhaps
+      in one of the small stores what she failed to secure in the larger, a
+      position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's wife to
+      sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking about for a
+      room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small and wretchedly
+      furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap dressmaker. The approach
+      was forbidding enough. One entered a cavelike, cobble-paved court under
+      the building, filled with wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and swearing
+      teamsters. From the side a stone staircase took off and led, twisting from
+      one landing cave to another, to the upper floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of sewing-machines,
+      the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a home but a hiding-place,
+      took the room at once. She was asked for no reference. In a sort of agony
+      lest this haven fail her she paid for a week in advance. The wooden bed,
+      the cracked mirror over the table, even the pigeons outside on the
+      windowsill were hers for a week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have it cleaned,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;I have been so busy: the
+      masquerade season is on. The Fraulein is American, is she not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One knows the Americans. They are chic, not like the English. I have some
+      American customers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony started. The dressmaker was shrewd. Many people hid in the
+      sixteenth district. She hastened to reassure the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will not disturb you. And just now I have but one, a dancer. I shall
+      have the room cleaned. Good-bye, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So far, good. She had a refuge now, one spot that the venom of scandal
+      could not poison, where she could study and work&mdash;work hard, although
+      there could be no more lessons&mdash;one spot where Peter would not have
+      to protect her, where Peter, indeed, would never find her. This thought,
+      which should have brought comfort, brought only new misery. Peace seemed
+      dearly bought all at once; shabby, wholesome, hearty Peter, with his rough
+      hair and quiet voice, his bulging pockets and steady eyes&mdash;she was
+      leaving Peter forever, exchanging his companionship for that of a row of
+      pigeons on a window-sill. He would find some one, of course; but who would
+      know that he liked toast made hard and plenty of butter, or to leave his
+      bed-clothing loose at the foot, Peter being very long and apt to lop over?
+      The lopping over brought a tear or two. A very teary and tragic young
+      heroine, this Harmony, prone to go about for the last day or two with a
+      damp little handkerchief tucked in her sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt her way down the staircase and into the cave below. Fate hangs by
+      a very slender thread sometimes. If a wagon had not lumbered by as she
+      reached the lowest step, so that she must wait and thus had time to lower
+      her veil, she would have been recognized at once by the little Georgiev,
+      waiting to ascend. But the wagon was there, Harmony lowered her veil, the
+      little Georgiev, passing a veiled young woman in the gloom, went up the
+      staircase with even pulses and calm and judicial bearing, up to the tiny
+      room a floor or two below Harmony's, where he wrote reports to the
+      Minister of War and mixed them with sonnets&mdash;to Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony went back to the Siebensternstrasse, having accomplished what she
+      had set out to do and being very wretched in consequence. Because she was
+      leaving the boy so soon she strove to atone for her coming defection by
+      making it a gala evening. The child was very happy. She tucked him up in
+      the salon, lighted all the candles, served him the daintiest of suppers
+      there. She brought in the mice and tied tiny bows on their necks; she
+      played checkers with him while the supper dishes waited, and went down to
+      defeat in three hilarious games; and last of all she played to him, joyous
+      music at first, then slower, drowsier airs, until his heavy head dropped
+      on his shoulder and she gathered him up in tender arms and carried him to
+      bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was dawn when Marie arrived. Harmony was sleeping soundly when the bell
+      rang. Her first thought was that Peter had come back&mdash;but Peter
+      carried a key. The bell rang again, and she slipped on the old kimono and
+      went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it Peter?&rdquo; she called, hand on knob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come from Peter. I have a letter,&rdquo; in German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not know me&mdash;Marie Jedlicka. Please let me come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bewildered, Harmony opened the door, and like a gray ghost Marie slipped
+      by her and into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a gaslight burning very low; Harmony turned it up and faced her
+      visitor. She recognized her at once&mdash;the girl Dr. Stewart had been
+      with in the coffee-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something has happened to Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. He is well. He sent this to the Fraulein Wells.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Fraulein Wells.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie held out the letter and staggered. Harmony put her in a chair; she
+      was bewildered, almost frightened. Crisis of some sort was written on
+      Marie's face. Harmony felt very young, very incapable. The other girl
+      refused coffee, would not even go into the salon until Peter's letter had
+      been read. She was a fugitive, a criminal; the Austrian law is severe to
+      those that harbor criminals. Let Harmony read:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DEAR HARRY,&mdash;Will you forgive me for this and spread the wings of
+      your splendid charity over this poor child? Perhaps I am doing wrong in
+      sending her to you, but just now it is all I can think of. If she wants to
+      talk let her talk. It will probably help her. Also feed her, will you? And
+      if she cannot sleep, give her one of the blue powders I fixed for Jimmy.
+      I'll be back later to-day if I can make it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;PETER&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony glanced up from the letter. Marie sat drooping in her chair. Her
+      eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her at once, but any
+      surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in Peter's apartment was
+      sunk in a general apathy, a compound of nervous reaction and fatigue.
+      During the long hours in the express she had worn herself out with fright
+      and remorse: there was nothing left now but exhaustion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold kitchen
+      and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she could in the
+      salon, and then went into her room to dress. There she read the letter
+      again, and wondered if Peter had gone through life like this, picking up
+      waifs and strays and shouldering their burdens for them. Decidedly, life
+      with Peter was full of surprises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remembered, as she hurried into her clothes; the boys' club back in
+      America and the spelling-matches. Decidedly, also, Peter was an
+      occupation, a state of mind, a career. No musician, hoping for a career of
+      her own, could possibly marry Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a curious morning in the old lodge of Maria Theresa, while
+      Stewart in the Pension Waldheim struggled back to consciousness, while
+      Peter sat beside him and figured on an old envelope the problem of
+      dividing among four enough money to support one, while McLean ate his
+      heart out in wretchedness in his hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie told her story over the early breakfast, sitting with her thin
+      elbows on the table, her pointed chin in her palms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now I am sorry,&rdquo; she finished. &ldquo;It has done no good. If it had only
+      killed her but she was not much hurt. I saw her rise and bend over him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was silent. She had no stock of aphorisms for the situation, no
+      worldly knowledge, only pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did Peter say he would recover?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. They will both recover and go to America. And he will marry her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps Harmony would have been less comfortable, Marie less frank, had
+      Marie realized that this establishment of Peter's was not on the same
+      basis as Stewart's had been, or had Harmony divined her thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The presence of the boy was discovered by his waking. Marie was taken in
+      and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a
+      marvelous people&mdash;to have taken into their house and their hearts
+      this strange child&mdash;if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little
+      slum mind was not certain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the safety and comfort of the little apartment the Viennese expanded,
+      cheered. She devoted herself to the boy, telling him strange folk tales,
+      singing snatches of songs for him. The youngster took a liking to her at
+      once. It seemed to Harmony, going about her morning routine, that Marie
+      was her solution and Peter's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the afternoon she took a package to the branch post-office and
+      mailed it by parcel-post to the Wollbadgasse. On the way she met Mrs.
+      Boyer face to face. That lady looked severely ahead, and Harmony passed
+      her with her chin well up and the eyes of a wounded animal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean sent a great box of flowers that day. She put them, for lack of a
+      vase, in a pitcher beside Jimmy's bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At dusk a telegram came to say that Stewart was better and that Peter was
+      on his way down to Vienna. He would arrive at eight. Time was very short
+      now&mdash;seconds flashed by, minutes galloped. Harmony stewed a chicken
+      for supper, and creamed the breast for Jimmy. She fixed the table, flowers
+      in the center, the best cloth, Peter's favorite cheese. Six o'clock,
+      six-thirty, seven; Marie was telling Jimmy a fairy tale and making the
+      fairies out of rosebuds. The studylamp was lighted, the stove glowing,
+      Peter's slippers were out, his old smoking-coat, his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quarter past seven. Peter would be near Vienna now and hungry. If he
+      could only eat his supper before he learned&mdash;but that was impossible.
+      He would come in, as he always did, and slam the outer door, and open it
+      again to close it gently, as he always did, and then he would look for
+      her, going from room to room until he found her&mdash;only to-night he
+      would not find her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not say good-bye to Jimmy. She stood in the doorway and said a
+      little prayer for him. Marie had made the flower fairies on needles, and
+      they stood about his head on the pillow&mdash;pink and yellow and white
+      elves with fluffy skirts. Then, very silently, she put on her hat and
+      jacket and closed the outer door behind her. In the courtyard she turned
+      and looked up. The great chandelier in the salon was not lighted, but from
+      the casement windows shone out the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter had had many things to think over during the ride down the
+      mountains. He had the third-class compartment to himself, and sat in a
+      corner, soft hat over his eyes. Life had never been particularly simple to
+      Peter&mdash;his own life, yes; a matter of three meals a day&mdash;he had
+      had fewer&mdash;a roof, clothing. But other lives had always touched him
+      closely, and at the contact points Peter glowed, fused, amalgamated. Thus
+      he had been many people&mdash;good, indifferent, bad, but all needy. Thus,
+      also, Peter had committed vicarious crimes, suffered vicarious illnesses,
+      starved, died, loved&mdash;vicariously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, after years of living for others, Peter was living at last for
+      himself&mdash;and suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that he understood exactly what ailed him. He thought he was tired,
+      which was true enough, having had little sleep for two or three nights.
+      Also he explained to himself that he was smoking too much, and resolutely&mdash;lighted
+      another cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two things had revealed Peter's condition to himself: McLean had said:
+      &ldquo;You are crazy in love with her.&rdquo; McLean's statement, lacking subtlety,
+      had had a certain quality of directness. Even then Peter, utterly
+      miserable, had refused to capitulate, when to capitulate would have meant
+      the surrender of the house in the Siebensternstrasse. And the absence from
+      Harmony had shown him just where he stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with
+      it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly it
+      was, this love. Even if Harmony cared&mdash;and at the mere thought his
+      heart pounded&mdash;what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her
+      to accept the half of&mdash;nothing, to give up a career to share his
+      struggle for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty
+      under a bushel that he might wave aloft his feeble light!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was no way out, no royal road to fortune by the route he had
+      chosen; nothing but grinding work, with a result problematical and years
+      ahead. There were even no legacies to expect, he thought whimsically.
+      Peter had known a chap once, struggling along in gynecology, who had had a
+      fortune left him by a G. P., which being interpreted is Grateful Patient.
+      Peter's patients had a way of living, and when they did drop out, as
+      happened now and then, had also a way of leaving Peter an unpaid bill in
+      token of appreciation; Peter had even occasionally helped to bury them, by
+      way, he defended himself, of covering up his mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, sitting back in his corner, allowed the wonderful scenery to slip
+      by unnoticed. He put Harmony the Desirable out of his mind, and took to
+      calculating on a scrap of paper what could be done for Harmony the
+      Musician. He could hold out for three months, he calculated, and still
+      have enough to send Harmony home and to get home himself on a slow boat.
+      The Canadian lines were cheap. If Jimmy lived perhaps he could take him
+      along: if not&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would have to put six months' work in the next three. That was not so
+      hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived on it. Also
+      there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in the salon propped in a
+      chair and Harmony playing, the room dark save for the glow from the stove
+      and for the one candle at Harmony's elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All roads lead to Rome. Peter's thoughts, having traveled in a circle,
+      were back again to Harmony the Desirable&mdash;Harmony playing in the
+      firelight, Harmony Hushed over the brick stove, Harmony paring potatoes
+      that night in the kitchen when he&mdash;Harmony! Harmony!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart knew all about the accident and its cause. Peter had surmised as
+      much when the injured man failed to ask for Marie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tested him finally by bringing Marie's name into the conversation.
+      Stewart ignored it, accepted her absence, refused to be drawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was at first. During the day, however, as he gained strength, he grew
+      restless and uneasy. As the time approached for Peter to leave, he was
+      clearly struggling with himself. The landlady had agreed to care for him
+      and was bustling about the room. During one of her absences he turned to
+      Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose Marie hasn't been round?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She came back last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she tell you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, poor child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a devil!&rdquo; Stewart said, and lay silent. Then: &ldquo;I saw her shoot that
+      thing out in front of us, but there was no time&mdash;Where is she now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marie? I sent her to Vienna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart fell back, relieved, not even curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank Heaven for that!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I don't want to see her again. I'd do
+      something I'd be sorry for. The kindest thing to say for her is that she
+      was not sane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Peter gravely, &ldquo;she was hardly sane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart caught his steady gaze and glanced away. For him Marie's little
+      tragedy had been written and erased. He would forget it magnanimously. He
+      had divided what he had with her, and she had repaid him by attempting his
+      life. And not only his life, but Anita's. Peter followed his line of
+      reasoning easily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite a frequent complication, Stewart,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but every man to
+      whom it happens regards himself more or less as a victim. She fell in love
+      with you, that's all. Her conduct is contrary to the ethics of the game,
+      but she's been playing poor cards all along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That doesn't matter, does it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart had lain back and closed his eyes. No, it didn't matter. A sense
+      of great relief overwhelmed him. Marie was gone, frightened into hiding.
+      It was as if a band that had been about him was suddenly loosed: he
+      breathed deep, he threw out his arms and laughed from sheer reaction.
+      Then, catching Peter's not particularly approving eyes, he colored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord, Peter!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you don't know what I've gone through with
+      that little devil. And now she's gone!&rdquo; He glanced round the disordered
+      room, where bandages and medicines crowded toilet articles on the
+      dressing-table, where one of Marie's small slippers still lay where it had
+      fallen under the foot of the bed, where her rosary still hung over the
+      corner of the table. &ldquo;Ring for the maid, Peter, will you! I've got to get
+      this junk out of here. Some of Anita's people may come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During that afternoon ride, while the train clump-clumped down the
+      mountains, Peter thought of all this. Some of Marie's &ldquo;junk&rdquo; was in his
+      bag; her rosary lay in his breastpocket, along with the pin he had sent
+      her at Christmas. Peter happened on it, still in its box, which looked as
+      if it had been cried over. He had brought it with him. He admired it very
+      much, and it had cost money he could ill afford to spend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late when the train drew into the station. Peter, encumbered with
+      Marie's luggage and his own, lowered his window and added his voice to the
+      chorus of plaintive calls: &ldquo;Portier! Portier!&rdquo; they shouted. &ldquo;Portier!&rdquo;
+       bawled Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was obliged to resort to the extravagance of a taxicab. Possibly a
+      fiacre would have done as well, but it cost almost as much and was slower.
+      Moments counted now: a second was an hour, an hour a decade. For he was on
+      his way to Harmony. Extravagance became recklessness. As soon die for a
+      sheep as a lamb! He stopped the taxicab and bought a bunch of violets,
+      stopped again and bought lilies of the valley to combine with the violets,
+      went out of his way to the American grocery and bought a jar of preserved
+      fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By that time he was laden. The jar of preserves hung in one shabby pocket,
+      Marie's rosary dangled from another; the violets were buttoned under his
+      overcoat against the cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the very last he held the taxi an extra moment and darted into the
+      delicatessen shop across the Siebensternstrasse. From there, standing
+      inside the doorway, he could see the lights in the salon across the way,
+      the glow of his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. Peter whistled,
+      stamped his cold feet, quite neglected&mdash;in spite of repeated warnings
+      from Harmony&mdash;to watch the Herr Schenkenkaufer weigh the cheese,
+      accepted without a glance a ten-Kronen piece with a hole in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how is the child to-day?&rdquo; asked the Herr Schenkenkaufer, covering the
+      defective gold piece with conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know; I have been away,&rdquo; said Peter. He almost sang it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All is well or I would have heard. Wilhelm the Portier was but just now
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All well, of course,&rdquo; sang Peter, eyes on the comfortable Floor of his
+      lamp, the flicker that was the fire. &ldquo;Auf wiedersehen, Herr
+      Schenkenkaufer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Auf wiedersehen, Herr Doktor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Violets, lilies-of-the-valley, cheese, rosary, luggage&mdash;thus Peter
+      climbed the stairs. The Portier wished to assist him, but Peter declined.
+      The Portier was noisy. There was to be a moment when Peter, having
+      admitted himself with extreme caution, would present himself without so
+      much as a creak to betray him, would stand in a doorway until some one,
+      Harmony perhaps&mdash;ah, Peter!&mdash;would turn and see him. She had a
+      way of putting one slender hand over her heart when she was startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter put down the jar of preserved peaches outside. It was to be a second
+      surprise. Also he put down the flowers; they were to be brought in last of
+      all. One surprise after another is a cumulative happiness. Peter did not
+      wish to swallow all his cake in one bite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For once he did not slam the outer door, although he very nearly did, and
+      only caught it at the cost of a bruised finger. Inside he listened. There
+      was no clatter of dishes, no scurrying back and forth from table to stove
+      in the final excitement of dishing up. There was, however, a highly
+      agreeable odor of stewing chicken, a crisp smell of baking biscuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the darkened hall Peter had to pause to steady himself. For he had a
+      sudden mad impulse to shout Harmony's name, to hold out his arms, to call
+      her to him there in the warm darkness, and when she had come, to catch her
+      to him, to tell his love in one long embrace, his arms about her, his
+      rough cheek against her soft one. No wonder he grew somewhat dizzy and had
+      to pull himself together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence rather surprised him, until he recalled that Harmony was
+      probably sewing in the salon, as she did sometimes when dinner was ready
+      to serve. The boy was asleep, no doubt. He stole along on tiptoe, hardly
+      breathing, to the first doorway, which was Jimmy's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was asleep. Round him were the pink and yellow and white flower
+      fairies with violet heads. Peter saw them and smiled. Then, his eyes
+      growing accustomed to the light, he saw Marie, face down on the floor, her
+      head on her arms. Still as she was, Peter knew she was not sleeping, only
+      fighting her battle over again and losing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the joyousness of his return fled from Peter, never to come back.
+      The two silent figures were too close to tragedy. Peter, with a long
+      breath, stole past the door and on to the salon. No Harmony there, but the
+      great room was warm and cheery. The table was drawn near the stove and
+      laid for Abendessen. The white porcelain coffee-pot had boiled and
+      extinguished itself, according to its method, and now gently steamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted but burning
+      low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little money&mdash;almost
+      all he had left Harmony when he went away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
+      discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the rooms
+      revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at last the fact
+      stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter refused to accept it. He
+      sat for a half-hour or even more by the fire in the salon, obstinately
+      refusing to believe she was gone, keeping the supper warm against her
+      return. He did not think or reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing,
+      hardly moving, save when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he
+      was all alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
+      outer door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by alarm. During
+      all the time that followed, that condition persisted, fright, almost
+      terror. Harmony alone in the city, helpless, dependent, poverty-stricken.
+      Harmony seeking employment under conditions Peter knew too well. But with
+      his alarm came rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
+      gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the frightened
+      Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation after accusation
+      against some unnamed woman to whom he applied epithets that Marie's
+      English luckily did not comprehend. Not a particularly heroic figure was
+      Peter that night: a frantic, disheveled individual, before whom the
+      Portier cowered, who struggled back to sanity through a berserk haze and
+      was liable to swift relapses into fury again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be Peter's for
+      many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim determination to keep on
+      searching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the cabstands in
+      the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The delicatessen seller had
+      seen her go out that afternoon with a bundle and return without it. She
+      had been gone only an hour or so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that she
+      might have found a haven in the neighborhood&mdash;until he recalled the
+      parcel-post.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief, but she had
+      also offered the girl a home. She might be at the Boyers'. Peter, flinging
+      on a hat and without his overcoat, went to the Boyers'. Time was valuable,
+      and he had wasted an hour, two hours, in useless rage. So he took a
+      taxicab, and being by this time utterly reckless of cost let it stand
+      while he interviewed the Boyers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring. Peter was
+      past explanation or ceremonial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is Harmony here?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harmony?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. &ldquo;I don't
+      know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the bedroom, and
+      for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter suffered the tortures of
+      the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had meant to say by way of protest at the
+      intrusion on the sacred privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died in her
+      throat. Her plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps with
+      guilt. Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet story;
+      Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her unstayed
+      figure, listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; finished Peter, &ldquo;that since you had offered her a refuge&mdash;from
+      me&mdash;she might have come here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I offered her a refuge&mdash;before I had been to the Pension Schwarz.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Peter slowly. &ldquo;And what about the Pension Schwarz?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am obliged to
+      say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the girl come here I
+      could hardly&mdash;Frank, I will speak!&mdash;I could hardly have taken
+      her in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling out into
+      the hall again. There he thought of something to say in reply,
+      repudiation, thought better of it, started down the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he put his
+      hand on Peter's shoulder. &ldquo;You know, old man, I don't believe that. These
+      women&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said Peter simply. &ldquo;Thank you. Good-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean, from Mrs.
+      Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing herself, to cutting the
+      threads that bound her to the life in the Siebensternstrasse. She had
+      drawn all her money, as Peter discovered later. The discovery caused him
+      even more acute anxiety. The city was full of thieves; poverty and its
+      companion, crime, lurked on every shadowy staircase of the barracklike
+      houses, or peered, red-eyed, from every alleyway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And into this city of contrasts&mdash;of gray women of the night hugging
+      gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with loathsome gestures, of
+      smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths under great mustaches, of dapper
+      soldiers to whom the young girl unattended was potential prey, into this
+      night city of terror, this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine rubbing
+      elbows with frost-nipped flesh, destitution sauntering along the
+      fashionable Prater for lack of shelter, gilt wheels of royalty and yellow
+      wheels of courtesans&mdash;Harmony had ventured alone for the second time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this time there was no Peter Byrne to accost her cheerily in the
+      twilight and win her by sheer friendliness. She was alone. Her funds were
+      lower, much lower. And something else had gone&mdash;her faith. Mrs. Boyer
+      had seen to that. In the autumn Harmony had faced the city clear-eyed and
+      unafraid; now she feared it, met it with averted eyes, alas! understood
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not the Harmony who had bade a brave farewell to Scatchy and the
+      Big Soprano in the station who fled to her refuge on the upper floor of
+      the house in the Wollbadgasse. This was a hunted creature, alternately
+      flushed and pale, who locked her door behind her before she took off her
+      hat, and who, having taken off her hat and surveyed her hiding-place with
+      tragic eyes, fell suddenly to trembling, alone there in the gaslight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had had no plans beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to think
+      the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing to eat, and the
+      single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no German. The dressmaker
+      had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not know where to find a restaurant,
+      was afraid to trust herself to the streets alone. She went to bed
+      supperless, with a tiny picture of Peter and Jimmy and the wooden sentry
+      under her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pigeons, cooing on the window-sill, wakened her early. She was
+      confused at first, got up to see if Jimmy had thrown off his blankets, and
+      wakened to full consciousness with the sickening realization that Jimmy
+      was not there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dressmaker, whose name was Monia Reiff, slept late after her evening
+      out. Harmony, collapsing with hunger and faintness, waited as long as she
+      could. Then she put on her things desperately and ventured out. Surely at
+      this hour Peter would not be searching, and even if he were he would never
+      think of the sixteenth district. He would make inquiries, of course&mdash;the
+      Pension Schwarz, Boyers', the master's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The breakfast brought back her strength and the morning air gave her
+      confidence. The district, too, was less formidable than the neighborhood
+      of the Karntnerstrasse and the Graben. The shops were smaller. The windows
+      exhibited cheaper goods. There was a sort of family atmosphere about many
+      of them; the head of the establishment in the doorway, the wife at the
+      cashier's desk, daughters, cousins, nieces behind the wooden counters. The
+      shopkeepers were approachable, instead of familiar. Harmony met no
+      rebuffs, was respectfully greeted and cheerfully listened to. In many
+      cases the application ended in a general consultation, shopkeeper, wife,
+      daughters, nieces, slim clerks with tiny mustaches. She got addresses,
+      followed them up, more consultations, more addresses, but no work. The
+      reason dawned on her after a day of tramping, during which she kept
+      carefully away from that part of the city where Peter might be searching
+      for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact was, of course, that her knowledge of English was her sole asset
+      as a clerk. And there were few English and no tourists in the sixteenth
+      district. She was marketing a commodity for which there was no demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lunched at a Konditorei, more to rest her tired body than because she
+      needed food. The afternoon was as the morning. At six o'clock, long after
+      the midwinter darkness had fallen, she stumbled back to the Wollbadgasse
+      and up the whitewashed staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a shock at the second landing. A man had stepped into the angle to
+      let her pass. A gasjet dared over his head, and she recognized the short
+      heavy figure and ardent eyes of Georgiev. She had her veil down luckily,
+      and he gave no sign of recognition. She passed on, and she heard him a
+      second later descending. But there had been something reminiscent after
+      all in her figure and carriage. The little Georgiev paused, halfway down,
+      and thought a moment. It was impossible, of course. All women reminded him
+      of the American. Had he not, only the day before, followed for two city
+      blocks a woman old enough to be his mother, merely because she carried a
+      violin case? But there was something about the girl he had just passed&mdash;Bah!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bad week for Harmony followed, a week of weary days and restless nights
+      when she slept only to dream of Peter&mdash;of his hurt and incredulous
+      eyes when he found she had gone; of Jimmy&mdash;that he needed her, was
+      worse, was dying. More than once she heard him sobbing and wakened to the
+      cooing of the pigeons on the window-sill. She grew thin and sunken-eyed;
+      took to dividing her small hoard, half of it with her, half under the
+      carpet, so that in case of accident all would not be gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, as it happened, was serious. One day, the sixth, she came back wet
+      to the skin from an all-day rain, to find that the carpet bank had been
+      looted. There was no clue. The stolid Hungarian, startled out of her
+      lethargy, protested innocence; the little dressmaker, who seemed honest
+      and friendly, wept in sheer sympathy. The fact remained&mdash;half the
+      small hoard was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two days more, a Sunday and a Monday. On Sunday Harmony played, and
+      Georgiev in the room below, translating into cipher a recent conference
+      between the Austrian Minister of War and the German Ambassador, put aside
+      his work and listened. She played, as once before she had played when life
+      seemed sad and tragic, the &ldquo;Humoresque.&rdquo; Georgiev, hands behind his head
+      and eyes upturned, was back in the Pension Schwarz that night months ago
+      when Harmony played the &ldquo;Humoresque&rdquo; and Peter stooped outside her door.
+      The little Bulgarian sighed and dreamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony, a little sadder, a little more forlorn each day, pursued her
+      hopeless quest. She ventured into the heart of the Stadt and paid a part
+      of her remaining money to an employment bureau, to teach English or
+      violin, whichever offered, or even both. After she had paid they told her
+      it would be difficult, almost impossible without references. She had
+      another narrow escape as she was leaving. She almost collided with Olga,
+      the chambermaid, who, having clashed for the last time with Katrina, was
+      seeking new employment. On another occasion she saw Marie in the crowd and
+      was obsessed with a longing to call to her, to ask for Peter, for Jimmy.
+      That meeting took the heart out of the girl. Marie was white and weary&mdash;perhaps
+      the boy was worse. Perhaps Peter&mdash;Her heart contracted. But that was
+      absurd, of course, Peter was always well and strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two things occurred that week, one unexpected, the other inevitable. The
+      unexpected occurrence was that Monia Reiff, finding Harmony being pressed
+      for work, offered the girl a situation. The wage was small, but she could
+      live on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inevitable was that she met Georgiev on the stairs without her veil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first day in the workroom. The apprentices were carrying home
+      boxes for a ball that night. Thread was needed, and quickly. Harmony, who
+      did odds and ends of sewing, was most easily spared. She slipped on her
+      jacket and hat and ran down to the shop near by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the return that she met Georgiev coming down. The afternoon was
+      dark and the staircase unlighted. In the gloom one face was as another.
+      Georgiev, listening intently, hearing footsteps, drew back into the
+      embrasure of a window and waited. His swarthy face was tense, expectant.
+      As the steps drew near, were light feminine instead of stealthy, the
+      little spy relaxed somewhat. But still he waited, crouched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a second before he recognized Harmony, another instant before he
+      realized his good fortune. She had almost passed. He put out an unsteady
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Herr Georgiev!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes gleamed. He
+      struggled against the barrier of language, broke out in passionate Bulgar,
+      switched to German punctuated with an English word here and there. Made
+      intelligible, it was that he had found her at last. Harmony held her
+      spools of thread and waited for the storm of languages to subside. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony colored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am&mdash;am hiding,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;Something very uncomfortable
+      happened and I came here. Please don't say you have seen me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly, with his
+      ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed of course. His
+      incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had actually been in the
+      same building with him while he sought her everywhere else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;it was you who played Sunday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I surely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall meet again, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein,&mdash;with all respect,&mdash;sometime perhaps you will walk
+      out with me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very busy all day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect, Fraulein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was touched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometime,&rdquo; she consented. And then impulsively: &ldquo;I am very lonely, Herr
+      Georgiev.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and kissed it
+      reverently. The Herr Georgiev's father was a nobleman in his own country,
+      and all the little spy's training had been to make of a girl in Harmony's
+      situation lawful prey. But in the spy's glowing heart there was nothing
+      for Harmony to fear. She knew it. He stood, hat in hand, while she went up
+      the staircase. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein!&rdquo; anxiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours hat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw no one there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows, listened
+      until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he clapped his hat on
+      his head and made his cautious way down to the street. There was no man in
+      a green velours hat below, but the little spy had an uneasy feeling that
+      eyes watched him, nevertheless. Life was growing complicated for the Herr
+      Georgiev.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a life she had
+      never touched before. She discovered, after a day or two in the work-room,
+      that Monia Reiff's business lay almost altogether among the demi-monde.
+      The sewing-girls, of Marie's type many of them, found in the customers
+      endless topics of conversation. Some things Harmony was spared, much of
+      the talk being in dialect. But a great deal of it she understood, and she
+      learned much that was not spoken. They talked freely of the women, their
+      clothes, and they talked a great deal about a newcomer, an American
+      dancer, for whom Monia was making an elaborate outfit. The American's name
+      was Lillian Le Grande. She was dancing at one of the variety theaters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman&mdash;a gold
+      brocade slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of bodice made
+      of gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with Georgiev she met her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping. Monia,
+      flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and glanced over the
+      girls. She singled out Harmony finally and called her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and put on the American's gown,&rdquo; she ordered. &ldquo;She wishes&mdash;Heaven
+      knows what she wishes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein Le Grande
+      had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when she found herself
+      obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one terrible moment before the
+      little dressmaker's amused eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou art very lovely, very chic,&rdquo; said Monia. The dress added to rather
+      than relieved Harmony's discomfiture. She donned it in one of the
+      fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining off a corner of
+      the large reception room. The slashed skirt embarrassed her; the low cut
+      made her shrink. Monia was frankly entranced. Above the gold tissue of the
+      bodice rose Harmony's exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold; even her
+      eyes looked golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave a pull
+      here, a pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the things she
+      made!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind the
+      curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit more of the
+      girl's rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the curtain aside and
+      stood smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second's silence. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exquisite!&rdquo; she said in English. Then in halting German: &ldquo;Do not change a
+      line. It is perfect.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a glimpse of
+      herself and was startled. She had been wearing black for so long, and now
+      this radiant golden creature was herself. She was enchanted and abashed.
+      The slash in the skirt troubled her: her slender leg had a way of
+      revealing itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered another
+      gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the dress and into her
+      own shabby frock. On the other side of the curtain the dancer was talking.
+      Her voice was loud, but rather agreeable. She smoked a cigarette. Scraps
+      of chatter came to Harmony, and once a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is too pink&mdash;something more delicate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still no news, Fraulein?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn't so bad, is it? I could use
+      more rouge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child could be
+      stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became nasal,
+      full of venom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, they know well enough,&rdquo; she snapped. &ldquo;Those nurses know, and there's
+      a pig of a red-bearded doctor&mdash;I'd like to poison him. Separating
+      mother and child! I'm going to find him, if only to show them they are not
+      so smart after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her curtain, had
+      clutched at her heart. Jimmy's mother!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony's flight had had nothing to do
+      with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and
+      besides Peter had indicated that Harmony's absence was purely temporary.
+      But the breaking-up was inevitable. All day long the child lay in the
+      white bed, apathetic but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies for
+      his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite tame, played hide-and-seek
+      over the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his frantic search for
+      Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no
+      apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried obediently to
+      eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg to be taken into
+      the salon, as he once had done. There was a sort of mental confusion also.
+      He liked Marie to read his father's letters; but as he grew weaker the
+      occasional confusing of Peter with his dead father became a fixed idea.
+      Peter was Daddy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony's adjacent room
+      and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he put on
+      his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth sofa at
+      the foot of Jimmy's bed&mdash;lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he that
+      the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its
+      slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in
+      every night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp in
+      his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy's thin little chest.
+      Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the ears and developed
+      lines about his mouth that never left him again. He felt gray and old, and
+      sometimes bitter and hard also. The boy's condition could not be helped:
+      it was inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was eating his heart out
+      had been unnecessary and cruel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he wondered
+      how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he hoped it was
+      bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night, when the lamp
+      burned low and gusts of wind shook the old house, fearful thoughts came to
+      him&mdash;the canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought reason,
+      however. Harmony had been too rational, too sane for such an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean was Peter's great support in those terrible days. He was young and
+      hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to grease the machinery
+      of the police service; McLean could and did. In Berlin Harmony could not
+      have remained hidden for two days. In Vienna, however, it was different.
+      Returns were made to the department, but irregularly. An American music
+      student was missing. There were thousands of American music students in
+      the city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses. McLean offered a reward
+      and followed up innumerable music students.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became old and
+      haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this difference, that
+      with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day. With
+      McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following morning
+      he went to work with renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after all, the
+      iron had not struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a
+      life-and-death matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work. The
+      little household went on methodically. Marie remained; there had seemed
+      nothing else to do. She cooked Peter's food&mdash;what little he would
+      eat; she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept
+      the apartment neat. She was never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed, she
+      seemed to have lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely to
+      Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in spite of
+      his protests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been music and
+      Harmony's soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with
+      Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier had
+      once vibrated in response to Harmony's violin, almost absolute silence now
+      reigned. Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer creaked, and the
+      loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had been silenced out
+      of deference to the sick child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy's mother
+      in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day. McLean had sent
+      him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect that a young
+      girl answering Harmony's description had been seen in the park at
+      Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had gone out
+      together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And it had been as he
+      feared&mdash;a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing
+      her hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak.
+      Then back to the city again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had taken to making a daily round, to the master's, to the Frau
+      Professor Bergmeister's, along the Graben and the Karntnerstrasse, ending
+      up at the Doctors' Club in the faint hope of a letter. Wrath still
+      smouldered deep in Peter; he would not enter a room at the club if Mrs.
+      Boyer sat within. He had had a long hour with Dr. Jennings, and left that
+      cheerful person writhing in abasement. And he had held a stormy interview
+      with the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for a week, and exceedingly
+      nervous, being of the impression from Peter's manner that in the event of
+      Harmony not turning up an American gunboat would sail up the right arm of
+      the Danube and bombard the Pension Schwarz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the city in
+      the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean's elasticity was
+      deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into crowds, had taken on a
+      strained, concentrated look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man's ultrafashionable
+      dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms dangling between his knees, his
+      head down. Their common trouble had drawn the two together, or had drawn
+      McLean close to Peter, as if he recognized that there were degrees in
+      grief and that Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old rage at
+      Peter had died. Harmony's flight had proved the situation as no amount of
+      protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the girl; then he
+      and Peter would start even, and the battle to the best man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since he sat
+      down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted down from day to
+      day such details of their search as might be worth keeping. Now and then
+      he glanced at Peter as if he wished to say something, hesitated, fell to
+      work again over the notebook. Finally he ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How's the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so well to-day. I'm having a couple of men in to see him to-night. He
+      doesn't sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you sleep?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much. He's on my mind, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That and other things, Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think&mdash;wouldn't it be better to have a nurse. You can't go
+      like this all day and be up all night, you know. And Marie has him most of
+      the day.&rdquo; McLean, of course, had known Marie before. &ldquo;The boy ought to
+      have a nurse, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn't move without my hearing him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which exasperation
+      struggled with fatigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord, boy,&rdquo; he rasped, &ldquo;don't you suppose I'd have a nurse if I
+      could afford it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you let me help? I'd like to do something. I'm a useless cub in a
+      sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked in the hospital?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I shouldn't let
+      you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but&mdash;if he would be happier&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's settled, then,&rdquo; said McLean. &ldquo;Nurse Elisabet, if she can come. And&mdash;look
+      here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for a week and haven't had
+      the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it back when you
+      get it, any time, a year or ten years. I'll not miss it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't take anything now,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I'll remember it, and if things
+      get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to live. Marie is a
+      good manager, almost as good as&mdash;Harmony was.&rdquo; This with difficulty.
+      He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat seemed to close on
+      the name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to see
+      Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know, would
+      never notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev, got
+      on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the platform,
+      and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going well with
+      him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face suspiciously,
+      until they came to a rest on Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits
+      he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's
+      despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a
+      touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination,
+      recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension Schwarz&mdash;and
+      built him a little story that was not far from the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade,
+      when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people, when
+      Demel's was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with military
+      men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when the flower
+      women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in roses, when
+      sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the Cathedral, when the
+      lottery did the record business of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might happen
+      on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as in a crowd, with
+      people close, touching her, men staring at her, following her. He had
+      spent a frightful night in the Opera, scanning seat after seat, not so
+      much because he hoped to find her as because inaction was intolerable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the
+      Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He even
+      peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared
+      that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in the
+      early days of the winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because of
+      the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place
+      where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where
+      because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as it
+      passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser's window, where a
+      brilliant light shone on each face that passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the
+      desk spoke of him: &ldquo;He is there again, the gray man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is Russian. Look at his size.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But his shoes!&rdquo; triumphantly. &ldquo;They are American, little one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden
+      rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he is of the police,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;or a spy. There is much talk of
+      war.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such
+      sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rose, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer. The
+      customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange intentness
+      at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious clutch at her
+      heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to fetch the golden
+      rose that was to complete Le Grande's costume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another exit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of
+      Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking
+      along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and steady
+      ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed to
+      her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for her.
+      And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even then
+      he had not said he loved her&mdash;had not even known it, to be exact. Nor
+      had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him out of
+      her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so
+      enlightening as to poor Peter's quest, that Peter was growing thin and
+      white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own
+      position to realize Peter's. With the glimpse of him came a great longing
+      for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy's arms about her neck,
+      for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating harmlessly
+      against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the brick stove,
+      for Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant, at
+      the best, adding to Peter's burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the old
+      situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the
+      respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What
+      if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not
+      let his mother see him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom
+      until eight o'clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked
+      over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had seen
+      him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping watch
+      over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady eyes for
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the
+      sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places.
+      But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her,
+      became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see once
+      again the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp, the flicker that was the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She
+      put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted. She
+      achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car was
+      only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was white
+      and frightened when she reached the car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
+      delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light was
+      burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the money
+      drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
+      the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky, its
+      rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by the gate.
+      Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her. Peter's lamp
+      was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight from the salon
+      windows. The light was not regular&mdash;it disappeared at regular
+      intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some one beyond
+      range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and forward, back and
+      forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always paced the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
+      falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
+      cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower and
+      lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure. No one
+      came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in the
+      wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to the
+      door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of the
+      chain as it was stretched across the door inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's windows&mdash;and
+      Peter's&mdash;opened toward the back of the house, where in a brick-paved
+      courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and where the Portier
+      himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless desire to see at
+      least the light from the child's room possessed Harmony. Even the light
+      would be something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of
+      a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was never
+      locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the spruce tree to
+      the back of the house, it would be something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for her.
+      Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her
+      window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours of
+      night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So Harmony,
+      ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the corner of the
+      old lodge and thus to the courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving
+      shadows; on Jimmy's window-sill a jar of milk. And voices&mdash;some one
+      was singing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to
+      sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little
+      song Harmony had been wont to sing:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes.
+      And in the&mdash;hereafter&mdash;angels may
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Roll&mdash;the&mdash;stone&mdash;from&mdash;its&mdash;grave&mdash;away.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether.
+      Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down the
+      gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a minute,
+      two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks of the
+      Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old city, so
+      very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away.
+      Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood by
+      the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered Harmony
+      somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the night
+      before he went away:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the great
+      tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below. Peter
+      struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated his
+      face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, Peter,&rdquo; whispered Harmony. &ldquo;Good-night, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by relief
+      at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about again, weak
+      naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little less florid. But
+      the week's confinement had given him an opportunity to think over many
+      things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he had packed up the
+      last of Marie's small belongings and sent them down to Vienna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. &ldquo;Just how much talk do you suppose
+      this has made, Byrne?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's brows contracted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she had been
+      so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; doggedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but&mdash;you can't get away with
+      it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and not
+      a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wouldn't understand in a thousand years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea that
+      women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow. A
+      sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a man
+      has done with his life before a girl&mdash;the right girl&mdash;comes into
+      it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life
+      then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she
+      chooses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many would choose under those circumstances?&rdquo; he jibed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter smiled. &ldquo;Quite a few,&rdquo; he said cheerfully. &ldquo;It's a wrong system, of
+      course; but we can get a little truth out of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't get away with it&rdquo; stuck in Stewart's mind for several days. It
+      was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had
+      recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell Anita.
+      In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the affair against
+      his conscience and came out victorious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they
+      complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the
+      bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by midday;
+      and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid citizens, not
+      the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her traveling. In the
+      reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in the valley below the
+      pension with one of the women who wished to take the baths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after
+      the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon's treatment called
+      for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and
+      rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is the
+      remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with any
+      hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and looked
+      haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and
+      mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was quiet,
+      and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita's sitting room, the
+      girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond
+      and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses along
+      a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light was
+      extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train crept
+      out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling from
+      burrow to burrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her there
+      had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were times when
+      an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked into hers
+      with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would glance
+      away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps the
+      situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her by
+      its unusualness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely,
+      without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for
+      something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than
+      ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the thing,
+      of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita, barely
+      twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the world, not so
+      deep as Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would have been
+      merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In that case she
+      might be less than just, or more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech,
+      very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at, keenly
+      alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew not
+      what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully
+      potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger on
+      her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story&mdash;a preamble about
+      his upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna,
+      his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From
+      that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through
+      love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of
+      fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him,
+      this first evening absolutely alone with her. That and her nearness, and
+      the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm. Still he had not touched her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that. General
+      credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first. How
+      many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from
+      chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips
+      last. The woman is in his arms before he tells his love. It is by her
+      response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the
+      thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct.
+      Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl's hand, gained an
+      encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no rebuff
+      would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words? They
+      would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness stood
+      between them and must be painfully taken down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid this is stupid for you,&rdquo; said Anita out of the silence. &ldquo;Would
+      you like to go to the music-room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God forbid. I was thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of what?&rdquo; Encouragement this, surely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really? I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did I stir it up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's hardly the way I meant to put it. You've changed everything for
+      me. I care for you&mdash;a very great deal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he did not
+      touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in this fashion, or
+      was he making love?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm very glad you like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like you!&rdquo; Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice was
+      unmistakable. &ldquo;It's much more than that, Anita, so much more that I'm
+      going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help a little?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, if I can.&rdquo; She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face set and
+      dogged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. There's a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all these
+      places, isn't there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was not an accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send us over
+      the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a brief silence&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman&mdash;a girl, Anita. A girl
+      I had been living with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For he was
+      quivering with dread when he said it&mdash;the courage of the man who
+      faces a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would have broken into
+      speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and was silent. Stewart watched
+      her as best he could in the darkness, trying to gather further courage to
+      go on. He could not see her face, but her fingers, touching the edge of
+      the chair, quivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I tell you the rest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think I want to hear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to condemn me unheard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't anything you can say against the fact?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he made his
+      plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what had happened
+      simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort. And he emphasized the
+      lack of sentiment that prompted the arrangement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita spoke then for the first time: &ldquo;And when you tried to terminate it
+      she attempted to kill you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then neglected her for
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear that, Anita.
+      But lately, in the last month or two, she&mdash;I suppose I should have
+      seen that she&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nineteen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had watched her
+      with wide, almost childish eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train coming
+      up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is she now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came up to see
+      me after the&mdash;after the accident, sent her away. I think he's looking
+      after her. I haven't heard from him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you tell me all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! After that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That, or something similar, is in many men's lives. They don't tell it,
+      that's the difference. I 'm not taking any credit for telling you this.
+      I'm ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when I look at your bandaged arm
+      I'm suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to tell you. He said I couldn't get
+      away with it; some time or other it would come out. Then he said something
+      else. He said you'd probably understand, and that if you married me it was
+      better to start with a clean slate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of fact, an
+      offer&mdash;his past against hers, his future with hers. Her hand was
+      steady now. The light in the priest's house had been extinguished. The
+      chill of the mountain night penetrated Anita's white furs; and set her&mdash;or
+      was it the chill?&mdash;to shivering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I had not told you, would you have married me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so. I'll be honest, too. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the same man you would have married. Only&mdash;more honest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas hugged
+      the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside was the little
+      balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing and looked down, down.
+      Some of the arrogance of his new virtue left the man. He was suddenly
+      humbled. For the first time he realized a part of what Marie had endured
+      in that small room where the light burned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor little Marie!&rdquo; he said softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he could have
+      made. Anita rose and held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and see her,&rdquo; she said quietly. &ldquo;You owe her that. We'll be leaving
+      here in a day or so and I'll not see you again. But you've been honest,
+      and I will be honest, too. I&mdash;I cared a great deal, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this has killed it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you are going away&mdash;I'm afraid to leave you. You'll think
+      this thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you've been taught will
+      come&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?&rdquo; humbly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not want you to kiss me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the darkness. If he
+      could only have crushed her to him, made her feel the security of his
+      love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier of his own building was
+      between them. His voice was husky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the thing
+      that concerns us both&mdash;I love you. I never loved the other woman. I
+      never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing more like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall try to remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the doctor and
+      the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart again. But before
+      she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre at the door, she went out
+      on the terrace, and looked across to the Villa Waldheim, rising from among
+      its clustering trees. Although it was too far to be certain, she thought
+      she saw the figure of a man on the little balcony standing with folded
+      arms, gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his promise
+      in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of the following day,
+      for Vienna. The strain of the confession was over, but he was a victim of
+      sickening dread. To one thing only he dared to pin his hopes. Anita had
+      said she cared, cared a great deal. And, after all, what else mattered?
+      The story had been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of queer ideas
+      of right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He arrived in Vienna at nine o'clock that night. The imminence of his
+      interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a hurried supper,
+      and calling up the Doctors' Club by telephone found Peter's address in the
+      Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea, of course, that Marie was there. He
+      wanted to see Peter to learn where Marie had taken refuge, and
+      incidentally to get from Peter a fresh supply of moral courage for the
+      interview. For he needed courage. In vain on the journey down had he
+      clothed himself in armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment
+      in the train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a
+      luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this station she
+      had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a nap. Ah, but again,
+      at this part of the journey he had first seen Anita!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter's manner of
+      living those days was exceedingly vague. He had respected Peter's
+      reticence, after the manner of men with each other. Peter had once
+      mentioned a boy he was looking after, in excuse for leaving so soon after
+      the accident. That was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted. The street
+      was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart found the gate. Even
+      then he lost the path, and found himself among a group of trees, to touch
+      the lowest branches of any of which resulted in a shower of raindrops. To
+      add to his discomfort some one was walking in the garden, coming toward
+      him with light, almost stealthy steps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached, were very
+      close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness that even then all he
+      saw was a blacker shadow, and that was visible only because it moved. Then
+      a hand touched his arm, stopped as if paralyzed, drew back slowly,
+      fearfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Heavens!&rdquo; said poor Harmony faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please don't be alarmed. I have lost the path.&rdquo; Stewart's voice was
+      almost equally nervous. &ldquo;Is it to the right or the left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the right a dozen paces or so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it quite well. Please don't bother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn on
+      Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking God's own
+      language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance, they made the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you not coming in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I&mdash;I do not live here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark facade
+      of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment later heard the
+      closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort of curious place was
+      this, a great looming house that concealed in its garden a fugitive
+      American girl who came and went like a shadow, leaving only the memory of
+      a sweet voice strained with fright?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the Portier gave
+      him and followed the gentleman's gruff directions up the staircase. Peter
+      admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as well he might with Marie in the
+      salon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter's expression. He shook the
+      rain off his hat, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How are you?&rdquo; asked Peter dutifully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty good, except for a headache when I'm tired. What sort of a place
+      have you got here anyhow, Byrne?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,&rdquo; replied Peter, still preoccupied
+      with Marie and what was coming. &ldquo;Rather interesting old place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather,&rdquo; commented Stewart, &ldquo;with goddesses in the garden and all the
+      usual stunts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Goddesses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ran into one just now among the trees. 'A woman I forswore, but thou
+      being a goddess I forswore not thee.' English-speaking goddess, by
+      George!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and grasped
+      his arm in fingers of steel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven's sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in the
+      garden?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle a
+      situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke through a
+      hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the compass&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter's fingers closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart's manner lost its jauntiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a girl there,&rdquo; he said shortly. &ldquo;Couldn't see her. She spoke
+      English. Said she didn't live here, and broke for the gate the minute I
+      got to the path.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't see her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Nice voice, though. Young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was running down
+      the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to the Portier to unlock
+      the door, was a madman in everything but purpose. The Portier let him out
+      and returned to the bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boy above is worse,&rdquo; he said briefly. &ldquo;A strange doctor has just
+      come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug store.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier's wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can one expect?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;The good Herr Gott has forbidden
+      theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the druggist has gone to
+      visit his wife's mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I shall go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found Peter's
+      excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived, an old house,
+      isolated in a garden where rambled young women with soft voices. Hello, a
+      youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie. The place
+      was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the indescribable odor of
+      drugs that meant illness. He remembered that the boy was frail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose,
+      white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each other.
+      Marie's crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger than speech. It was
+      after a distinct pause that she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hast thou brought the police?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart's mental
+      condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it was with
+      tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And yet&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So it's old Peter now, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all. I swear
+      it. I look after the boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who else is here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one else; but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell that rot to some one who does not know you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not lie.&rdquo;
+       There was a catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men somewhat, but she
+      still cherished the feminine belief that jealousy is love, whereas it is
+      only injured pride. She took a step toward him. &ldquo;Walter, I am sorry. Do
+      you hate me?&rdquo; She had dropped the familiar &ldquo;thou.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stewart crossed the room until only Peter's table and lamp stood between
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't mean to be brutal,&rdquo; he said, rather largely, entirely conscious
+      of his own magnanimity. &ldquo;It was pretty bad up there and I know it. I don't
+      hate you, of course. That's hardly possible after&mdash;everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;would take me back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It's over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that's all; to see
+      that you were comfortable and not frightened. You're a silly child to
+      think of the police.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie put a hand to her throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the American, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. &ldquo;Then I wish I had
+      killed her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman for her
+      rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation in hand and Marie
+      only feebly formidable, was rather amused and flattered by the honest fury
+      in her voice. The mouse was under his paw; he would play a bit. &ldquo;You'll
+      get over feeling that way, kid. You don't really love me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were my God, that is all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you let me help you&mdash;money, I mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep it for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter will be here in a minute.&rdquo; He bent over the table and eyed her with
+      his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. &ldquo;Come round here and kiss me
+      for old times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a step or two
+      toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew himself up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite right and I'm a rotter.&rdquo; Marie's English did not comprehend
+      &ldquo;rotter,&rdquo; but she knew the tone. &ldquo;Listen, Marie, I've told the other girl,
+      and there's a chance for me, anyhow. Some day she may marry me. She asked
+      me to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not wish her pity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say, without a dot.
+      There is a chance in America for a clever girl. You are clever, little
+      Marie. The first money I can spare I'll send you&mdash;if you'll take it.
+      It's all I can do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled from
+      him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an explanation.
+      When at last she understood that he was sincere, she broke down. Stewart,
+      playing a new part and raw in it, found the situation irritating. But
+      Marie's tears were not entirely bitter. Back of them her busy young mind
+      was weaving a new warp of life, with all of America for its loom. Hope
+      that had died lived again. Before her already lay that great country where
+      women might labor and live by the fruit of their labor, where her tawdry
+      past would be buried in the center of distant Europe. New life beckoned to
+      the little Marie that night in the old salon of Maria Theresa, beckoned to
+      her as it called to Stewart, opportunity to one, love and work to the
+      other. To America!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go,&rdquo; she said at last simply. &ldquo;And I will not trouble you there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick gesture
+      she held it to her cheek, dropped it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He had not
+      found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well, still in Vienna,
+      and&mdash;she had come back! She had cared then enough to come back.
+      To-morrow he would commence again, would comb the city fine, and when he
+      had found her he would bring her back, the wanderer, to a marvelous
+      welcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few belongings
+      by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still stained with tears but
+      radiant with hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter,&rdquo; she said gravely, &ldquo;I must prepare my outfit. I go to America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With Stewart?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am very happy,
+      although&mdash;Peter, may I kiss you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her thin
+      shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who had cared
+      enough to come back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life,&rdquo; said Peter soberly, &ldquo;life is just one damned thing after another,
+      isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She said:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt you very
+      much&mdash;but not, believe me, without hurting myself. Perhaps my
+      uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing you, that I am not
+      so big as you thought I would be. For now, in this final letter, I can
+      tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear, I did care!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have gone
+      very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy as I have does
+      not support me to-night, that all my little rules of life are inadequate.
+      Individual liberty was one&mdash;but there is no liberty of the
+      individual. Life&mdash;other lives&mdash;press too closely. You, living
+      your life as seemed best and easiest, and carrying down with you into
+      shipwreck the little Marie and&mdash;myself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It is not
+      only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady revolt and
+      loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest before one succumbs
+      to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred that is a part of me and that
+      would never forget.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say that you are the same man I would have married, only more honest
+      for concealing nothing. But&mdash;and forgive me this, it insists on
+      coming up in my mind&mdash;were you honest, really? You told me, and it
+      took courage, but wasn't it partly fear? What motive is unmixed? Honesty&mdash;and
+      fear, Walter. You were preparing against a contingency, although you may
+      not admit this to yourself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am only
+      trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break is final. The
+      revolt is in myself, against something sordid and horrible which I will
+      not take into my life. And for that reason time will make no difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great deal of
+      this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter&mdash;home and children,
+      the love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals. And you ask me to
+      start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know you are resentful, but&mdash;I
+      know that you understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;ANITA.&rdquo; <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine was
+      threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with Bulgaria
+      sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing troops, and there were
+      long conferences in the Burg between the Emperor and various bearded
+      gentlemen, while the military prayed in the churches for war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on all day in
+      the small room below Harmony's on the Wollbadgasse. At night, when the man
+      in the green velours hat took a little sleep, mysterious packages were
+      carried down the whitewashed staircase and loaded into wagons waiting
+      below. Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the pigeons a carrier
+      pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morning after Harmony's flight from the garden in the Street of
+      Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She had put in a
+      sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She charged herself with
+      cowardice in running away from Peter and Jimmy when they needed her, and
+      in going back like a thief the night before. The conviction that the boy
+      was not so well brought with it additional introspection&mdash;her
+      sacrifice seemed useless, almost childish. She had fled because two men
+      thought it necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and
+      she did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had
+      promised herself, had been promised. But this career, for which she had
+      given up everything else&mdash;would she find it in the workroom of a
+      dressmaker?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose&mdash;how her cheeks
+      burned when she thought of it!&mdash;suppose she had taken Peter at his
+      word and married him? What about Peter's career? Was there any way by
+      which Peter's poverty for one would be comfort for two? Was there any
+      reason why Peter, with his splendid ability, should settle down to the
+      hack-work of general practice, the very slough out of which he had so
+      painfully climbed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Either of two things&mdash;go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or stay
+      where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew. There in the
+      little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held out her arms
+      longingly. &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Peter, dear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no one. The
+      instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at any cost
+      outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard and tired, looking
+      out. It was Harmony's chance, perhaps, to do a big thing; to prove herself
+      bigger than her fears, stronger than convention. But she was young,
+      bewildered, afraid. And there was this element, stronger than any of the
+      others&mdash;Peter had never told her he loved her. To go back, throwing
+      herself again on his mercy, was unthinkable. On his love&mdash;that was
+      different. But what if he did not love her? He had been good to her; but
+      then Peter was good to every one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his mother?
+      Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose he were to die
+      and his mother not see him? Harmony's sense of fairness rebelled. In the
+      small community at home mother was sacred, her claims insistent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on the sill;
+      over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous strip foretold the
+      sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the market, lumbered along the
+      streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony rose and lighted her fire, drew on
+      her slippers and the faded silk kimono with the pink butterflies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early morning dreams
+      of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining customers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in order, fed
+      the pigeons,&mdash;it was then she saw the carrier with its message,&mdash;made
+      her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside the stove. And all the
+      time, moving quietly through her morning routine, she was there in that
+      upper room in body only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in the
+      Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the hutch, and Peter,
+      with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed, toilet-table, coffee-pot,
+      Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise over the church roof, and Peter
+      again. Always Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear her,
+      muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the Hungarian maid
+      for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one of her new duties to
+      prepare the workroom for the day. The luminous streak above the church was
+      rose now, time for the day to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the door, so
+      faint was the sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony, expecting
+      Monia, called &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face. He stood
+      in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear toward the stairway.
+      It was very silent. Monia was drinking her coffee in bed, whither she had
+      retired for warmth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon!&rdquo; said the Bulgarian in a whisper. &ldquo;I listened until I heard you
+      moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something has happened!&rdquo; exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor to open
+      your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I fear&mdash;on the
+      sill, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once, but the
+      carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and set about its
+      breakfast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will he let me catch him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A handful of
+      grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown! Georgiev caught the
+      pigeon and drew the message from the tube. Even Harmony grasped the
+      seriousness of the situation. The little Bulgarian's face, from gray
+      became livid; tiny beads of cold sweat came out on his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I done?&rdquo; cried Harmony. &ldquo;Oh, what have I done? If I had known
+      about the pigeon&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Georgiev recovered himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Fraulein can do nothing wrong,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is a matter of an hour's
+      delay, that is all. It may not be too late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee. The sulky
+      Hungarian brought it without a glance in their direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too late for what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein, if I may trouble you&mdash;but glance from the window to the
+      street below. It is of an urgency, or I&mdash;Please, Fraulein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind
+      her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only a man in a green hat,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And down the street a group of
+      soldiers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are coming for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I with the pigeon&mdash;Oh, it's too horrible! Herr Georgiev, stay
+      here in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is mine&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the pigeon.
+      It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but a matter of&mdash;imprisonment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be something I can do,&rdquo; desperately. &ldquo;I hear them below. Is
+      there no way to the roof, no escape?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of
+      peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not going down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly,
+      and not for a lady to confront.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are coming up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
+      unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest,
+      turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fraulein,&rdquo; he said huskily, &ldquo;you are very lovely. I carry always in my
+      heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down the
+      staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap on
+      the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have
+      feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable
+      like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as
+      unobtrusively as he had entered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
+      washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered what
+      was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief are great
+      moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message, English,
+      German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Herr Georgiev has been arrested,&rdquo; she wrote. An hour later the
+      carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over the church
+      roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life. Grim-visaged war had
+      touched her and passed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building
+      followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned
+      out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden
+      hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor was found stored a quantity of
+      ammunition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished, when
+      the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the chattering
+      sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way to her
+      dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully
+      descended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her ears;
+      the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from the
+      workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition boxes
+      on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in,
+      toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, &ldquo;Yea, yea,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Nay,
+      nay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal, infinitely
+      touching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will not say that you have found, have seen me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in Harmony's mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to learn&mdash;of
+      Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that belonged to the old life
+      in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was no time. The sentry's impassive
+      face became rigid; he looked through her, not at her. Harmony turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was no further
+      chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the boxes down the
+      staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in the
+      market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in the
+      Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony's golden head as she bent over a bit of
+      chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the whitewashed staircase her
+      heavy cans of milk; on the carrier pigeon winging its way to the south;
+      beating in through bars to the exalted face of Herr Georgiev; resting on
+      Peter's drooping shoulders, on the neglected mice and the wooden soldier,
+      on the closed eyes of a sick child&mdash;the worshiped sun, peering forth&mdash;the
+      golden window of the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through the
+      night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had been
+      times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With the
+      daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of hope,
+      enough to make harder Peter's acceptance of the inevitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened his
+      eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter died
+      many deaths that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie,
+      creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently asleep
+      and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at her footstep
+      and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He motioned her
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must have a little sleep, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I'll stay until&mdash;Go back to bed. It is very early.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now it
+      was useless. At eight o'clock he let Marie take his place, then he bathed
+      and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another night. For
+      the child's release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast, but managed
+      only a cup of coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was insistent&mdash;the
+      boy's mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her. Peter might know
+      in his heart that he had done the best thing for the child, but like
+      Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse him. He had separated
+      mother and child. Who was he to have decided the mother's unfitness, to
+      have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the lives of others in his
+      hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where; the boy dying without his
+      mother. Whatever that mother might be, her place that day was with her
+      boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He was humbled as well as
+      stricken, poor Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the
+      mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter,
+      signed only &ldquo;Mamma,&rdquo; was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And for Heaven's sake be quick,&rdquo; wrote Peter. &ldquo;This is a matter of hours.
+      I meant well, but I've done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no matter
+      what she is or where you find her.&rdquo; The Portier carried the note. When he
+      came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and a lettuce
+      leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and amuse the boy.
+      He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. &ldquo;He saw it not,&rdquo; he reported
+      sadly to his wife. &ldquo;Be off to the church while I deliver this letter. And
+      this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in remembrance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At eleven o'clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair
+      sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He asks for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy's eyes were open and
+      fixed on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it another day?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, boy; another morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am cold, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he could
+      see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very humble, found
+      himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To see this small
+      soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a bit of light for
+      the journey! Peter's religion had been one of life and living, not of
+      creed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He knows, poor little one!&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of
+      broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the
+      cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from
+      the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One is sick, Jimmy boy,&rdquo; he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and
+      shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, honey, I think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind
+      too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed
+      eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter bent
+      over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, dear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid&mdash;it's going to die!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?&rdquo; asked Peter gently. &ldquo;To go to
+      heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer
+      and the sun always shines?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed
+      its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their dead
+      mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there grass?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;soft green grass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do&mdash;boys in heaven&mdash;go in their bare feet?&rdquo; Ah, small mind and
+      heart, so terrified and yet so curious!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, yes.&rdquo; And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted
+      such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint&mdash;a
+      heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of dear
+      departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees in
+      fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with smiling
+      eyes and death in his heart, a child's heaven of games and friendly
+      Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was
+      increasingly an effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should&mdash;like&mdash;to go there,&rdquo; he whispered at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk he
+      roused again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would like&mdash;to see&mdash;the sentry,&rdquo; he said with difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so again, and for the last time, Rosa's soldier from Salzburg with one
+      lung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed
+      muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears. Monia, upset over the
+      morning's excitement, was irritable and unreasonable. The gold-tissue
+      costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint. Below in the
+      courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where the
+      morning had seen such occurrences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of
+      salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of
+      playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour of
+      the day. To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia
+      quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the
+      pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play
+      such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her whole
+      beautiful face and body glowing with the melody she made, the girls found
+      the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she did not suspect
+      it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the workroom. She was not of
+      the people, they said&mdash;the daughter of a great American, of course,
+      run away to escape a loveless marriage. This was borne out by the report
+      of one of them who had glimpsed the silk petticoat. It was rumored also
+      that she wore no chemise, but instead an infinitely coquettish series of
+      lace and nainsook garments&mdash;of a fineness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not played
+      since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to Peter as she
+      had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little Georgiev as he went
+      down the staircase. And finally with a choke in her throat to the little
+      mother back home, so hopeful, so ignorant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of the day
+      at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd and coming back
+      quickly through the winter night. The staircase was always a peril, to be
+      encountered and conquered night after night and even in the daytime not to
+      be lightly regarded. On her way up this night she heard steps ahead,
+      heavy, measured steps that climbed steadily without pauses. For an instant
+      Harmony thought it sounded like Peter's step and she went dizzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had stood
+      that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels in, toes out,
+      chest out, was the sentry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony's first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the
+      building. Then she saw that the sentry's impassive face wore lines of
+      trouble. He saluted. &ldquo;Please, Fraulein.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not told the Herr Doktor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the child dies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jimmy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps, but of
+      moments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. &ldquo;You are sure? You
+      are not telling me so that I will go back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours. My wife,
+      Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and her cousin, the wife
+      of the Portier, weeps over the stove. Please, Fraulein, come with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he still lives?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all that was
+      personal and small and frightened, before the reality of death. She rose,
+      as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis; ceased trembling, got her
+      hat and coat and her shabby gloves and joined the sentry again. Another
+      moment's delay&mdash;to secure the Le Grande's address from Monia. Then
+      out into the night, Harmony to the Siebensternstrasse, the tall soldier to
+      find the dancer at her hotel, or failing that, at the Ronacher Music-Hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony took a taxicab&mdash;nothing must be spared now&mdash;bribed the
+      chauffeur to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across the
+      garden, still tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper flight, and
+      rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was nothing
+      to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in hand, alone, drear,
+      tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw Harmony and went white,
+      holding to the back of his chair. Their eyes met, agony and hope in them,
+      love and death, rapture and bitterness. In Harmony's, pleading, promise,
+      something of doubt; in Peter's, only yearning, as of empty arms. Then
+      Harmony dared to look at the bed and fell on her knees in a storm of grief
+      beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the immense
+      theater waiters scurried back and forward among the tables. Everywhere was
+      the clatter of silver and steel on porcelain, the clink of glasses. Smoke
+      was everywhere&mdash;pipes, cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between bites
+      at the tables, using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a gold one
+      shone here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners, spraying
+      the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the stage sat
+      the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph. They were drinking
+      cheap native wines and were very happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the people to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the box&mdash;don't stare, Liebchen, he looks&mdash;is the princeling
+      I have told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Last night! Were you here?&rdquo; He coughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when she
+      finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and tosses them
+      to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shameless! Is she so beautiful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But you shall see. She comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the program;
+      and because she sang in American, which is not exactly English and more
+      difficult to understand, her songs were considered exceedingly risque. As
+      a matter of fact they were merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to them
+      that caught the Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentimental ditties
+      and the artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another reason for
+      her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen pickaninnies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the
+      little chorus had made good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind
+      her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet coats
+      and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a pair sat on the boot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing against
+      dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by cigarettes and
+      absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled their American prototypes as
+      the night resembles the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
+      rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve little
+      darkies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sang &ldquo;Dixie,&rdquo; of course, and the &ldquo;Old Folks at Home&rdquo;; then a ragtime
+      medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and clogging with all
+      their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a whirling, nimble dance. The
+      little rhinestones on her stockings flashed; her opulent bosom quivered.
+      The Dozent, eyes on the dancer, squeezed his companion's hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love thee!&rdquo; he whispered, rather flushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then she sang &ldquo;Doan ye cry, mah honey.&rdquo; Her voice, rather coarse but
+      melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing and lilt of the
+      lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling, preternaturally solemn, linked
+      arms and swayed rhythmically, right, left, right, left. The glasses ceased
+      clinking; sturdy citizens forgot their steak and beer for a moment and
+      listened, knife and fork poised. Under the table the Dozent's hand pressed
+      its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer on Le Grande, but on the
+      woman across, his sweetheart, she who would be mother of his children. The
+      words meant little to the audience; the rich, rolling Southern lullaby
+      held them rapt:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Doan ye Cry, mah honey&mdash;
+     Doan ye weep no mo',
+     Mammy's gwine to hold her baby,
+     All de udder black trash sleepin' on the flo',&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against her
+      breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The crowd
+      applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung them. Glasses
+      and dishes clinked again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dozent bent across the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day&mdash;&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl blushed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little troupe. A
+      motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off, rounded them up like a
+      flock of chickens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier of the
+      old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room. For a moment gold
+      dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted each other. Then the sentry
+      touched his cap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and to-night he
+      dies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What child?&rdquo; Her arms were full of flowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The child from the hospital. Please to make haste.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with one hand in
+      Harmony's and one between Peter's two big ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward the last he called Peter &ldquo;Daddy&rdquo; and asked for a drink. His eyes,
+      moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the grayfaced woman in
+      a gold dress who stood staring down at him, rested a moment on the cage of
+      mice, came to a stop in the doorway, where stood the sentry, white and
+      weary, but refusing rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Harmony who divined the child's unspoken wish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The manual?&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across from the
+      old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but no lack of vigor,
+      went again through the Austrian manual of arms, and because he had no
+      carbine he used Peter's old walking-stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony he loved
+      her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had about given out, and
+      there was no way to get more save by earning it. The drain of Jimmy's
+      illness, the inevitable expense of the small grave and the tiny stone
+      Peter had insisted on buying, had made retreat his only course. True, Le
+      Grande had wished to defray all expenses, but Peter was inexorable. No
+      money earned as the dancer earned hers should purchase peaceful rest for
+      the loved little body. And after seeing Peter's eyes the dancer had not
+      insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference between
+      Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart raised the money
+      somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and eager, with the pin he had
+      sent her to Semmering at her throat. She kissed Peter on the cheek in the
+      station, rather to his embarrassment. From the lowered window, as the
+      train pulled out, she waved a moist handkerchief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be very good,&rdquo; she promised him. The last words he heard above
+      the grinding of the train were her cheery: &ldquo;To America!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food where he
+      might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the delicatessen
+      shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the house in the
+      Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until Marie's small
+      preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter was at the
+      station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her address. She
+      wrote:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before and
+      that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in the
+      Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have been
+      trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for me. You
+      must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I am managing
+      well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening lesson, and soon
+      I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can see how things are
+      looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to renew my music
+      lessons. And then, Peter,&mdash;the career!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;HARMONY.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her address was beneath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with the
+      letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer her
+      nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps, surely,
+      everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only once taken
+      the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life itself to him.
+      But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in everything else,
+      had sapped his confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself
+      confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined
+      face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child's head
+      against its breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must
+      let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to
+      success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had
+      proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care of
+      herself in the old city. Only&mdash;to go away and leave her there!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in the
+      Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen
+      during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony's every word, every
+      gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard work began to tell on her,
+      McLean's devotion would win its reward. McLean's devotion, with all that
+      it meant, the lessons again, community of taste, their common youth! Peter
+      felt old, very tired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his gray suit
+      to the Portier's wife to be pressed, and getting out his surgical case, as
+      he had once before in the Pension Schwarz, he sewed a button on his
+      overcoat, using the curved needle and the catgut and working with
+      surgeon's precision. Then, still working very carefully, he trimmed the
+      edges of graying hair over his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best
+      silk tie, now almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not
+      coming, he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy's room to feed the
+      mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with his face
+      working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in Peter's mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his defeat and
+      approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them. Then he decided against
+      this palpable appeal for sympathy, elected to go empty-handed and discover
+      merely how comfortable she was or was not. When the time came he would
+      slip out of her life, sending her a letter and leaving McLean on guard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase&mdash;where Harmony
+      had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down to his death&mdash;climbed
+      steadily, but without his usual elasticity. The place appalled him&mdash;its
+      gloom, its dinginess, its somber quiet. In the daylight, with the pigeons
+      on the sills and the morning sunlight printing the cross of the church
+      steeple on the whitewashed wall, it was peaceful, cloisterlike, with
+      landings that were crypts. But at night it was almost terrifying, that
+      staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper landing,
+      playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He waited outside
+      before ringing, heard her begin something determinedly cheerful, falter,
+      cease altogether. Peter rang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps&mdash;oh, certainly she had expected
+      him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how she was getting on,
+      how she was housed. She held out her hand and Peter took it. Still no
+      words, only a half smile from her and no smile at all from Peter, but his
+      heart in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You knew I would come,&rdquo; said Peter. &ldquo;The reception room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where customers wait.&rdquo; She still carried her violin, and slipped back to
+      her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its
+      meagerness. He drew a long breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen knitting a
+      stocking. The reception room was warm from the day's fire, and in order.
+      All the pins and scraps of the day had been swept up, and the portieres
+      that made fitting-rooms of the corners were pushed back. Peter saw only a
+      big room with empty corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were
+      Harmony's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet settee. They
+      were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first time. In the squalor of
+      the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable intimacies of the Street of Seven
+      Stars, they had been easy, unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was
+      tongue-tied. Only one thing in him clamored for utterance, and that he
+      sternly silenced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Of course, I understood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were not angry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I needed
+      you. Only, of course,&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll not say that, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please say it, Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me, only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only&mdash;I always need you!&rdquo; Peter, Peter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs a woman;
+      but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, of course&mdash;but&mdash;I'm generally in trouble, Harry dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of his
+      weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by stooping for a
+      neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had stuck it in his lapel he
+      had saved his mental forces from the rout of Harmony's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most delectable
+      look in the aforesaid eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't come to be silly,&rdquo; he said to the table. &ldquo;I hate people who
+      whine, and I've got into a damnable habit of being sorry for myself! It's
+      to laugh, isn't it, a great, hulking carcass like me, to be&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter,&rdquo; said Harmony softly, &ldquo;aren't you going to look at me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's cowardice. And I've fixed my hair a new way. Do you like it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Splendid,&rdquo; said Peter to the center table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rout of Harmony's eyes was supplemented by the rout of Harmony's hair.
+      Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony was half exasperated; she
+      would have boxed Peter's ears with a tender hand had she dared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced her at
+      last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going back to America, Harmony. I've got
+      all I can get here, all I came for&mdash;&rdquo; He stopped, seeing her face.
+      &ldquo;Well, of course, that's not true, I haven't. But I'm going back, anyhow.
+      You needn't look so stricken: I haven't lost my chance. I'll come back
+      sometime again and finish, when I've earned enough to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money on others,
+      and now you are going back just where you were, and&mdash;you are leaving
+      me here alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are alone, anyhow,&rdquo; said Peter, &ldquo;making your own way and getting
+      along. And McLean will be here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you turning me over to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, dear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember the night in Anna's room at the Schwartz when you
+      proposed to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No reply. Peter found another pin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young figure, her
+      luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter, I want you to&mdash;to ask me again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, listen to me, Harmony. You're sorry for me, that's all; I don't want
+      to be pitied. You stay here and work. You'll do big things. I had a talk
+      with the master while I was searching for you, and he says you can do
+      anything. But he looked at me&mdash;and a sight I was with worry and
+      fright&mdash;and he warned me off, Harmony. He says you must not marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old pig!&rdquo; said Harmony. &ldquo;I will marry if I please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless Peter's refusal and the master's speech had told somewhat.
+      She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood close, looking down
+      at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've said a lot I didn't mean to,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There's only one thing I
+      haven't said, I oughtn't to say it, dear. I'm not going to marry you&mdash;I
+      won't have such a thing on my conscience. But it doesn't hurt a woman to
+      know that a man loves her. I love you, dear. You're my heaven and my earth&mdash;even
+      my God, I'm afraid. But I will not marry you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even if I ask you to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even then, dear. To share my struggle&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; slowly. &ldquo;It is to be a struggle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hard fight, Harmony. I'm a pauper practically.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two poverties don't make a wealth, even of happiness,&rdquo; said Peter
+      steadily. &ldquo;In the time to come, when you would think of what you might
+      have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People have married, women have married and carried on their work, too,
+      Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of man,
+      Harry. I'm jealous&mdash;jealous of every one about you. It would have to
+      be the music or me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you make the choice!&rdquo; said Harmony proudly. &ldquo;Very well, Peter, I
+      shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious sort of love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; Peter cried, &ldquo;if you realize what love it is that loves you
+      enough to give you up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not asked me if I care, Peter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very beautiful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid to ask,&rdquo; said Peter, and picking up his hat he made for the
+      door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sweetest heart!&rdquo; he cried, and took her in his hungry arms. But even
+      then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her slender body held to
+      him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to her soft throat, Peter put her
+      from him as a starving man might put away food.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held her off and looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a fool and a weakling,&rdquo; he said gravely. &ldquo;I love you so much that I
+      would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my girl! As long as I
+      live I shall carry your image in my heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death that waited
+      down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her again, put away her
+      detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, Harmony,&rdquo; he said steadily. &ldquo;Always in my heart!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America, with the
+      recording angel opening a new page in life's ledger for her and a red-ink
+      line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his daddy wandering through the
+      heaven of friendly adventure and green fields, hand in hand; with the
+      carrier resting after its labors in the pigeon house by the rose-fields of
+      Sofia; with the sentry casting martial shadows through the barred windows
+      of the hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to die, dividing his
+      heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining into the
+      salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter's open trunk and shabby wardrobe
+      spread over chairs. An end of trunks and departure, as was the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God's acre, whence little Jimmy had
+      started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on the frost-covered
+      grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle of the Donau. Harmony had
+      taken her problem there, in the early hour before Monia would summon her
+      to labor&mdash;took her problem and found her answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too warmly clad,
+      walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper against the cold.
+      Already the air carried a hint of spring; there was a feeling of
+      resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt alive under-foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child had
+      repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it, with some
+      vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the little verse:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes:
+      And in the hereafter, angels may Roll the stone from its grave away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great bunch of
+      roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence they came. One of the
+      pickaninnies had carried the box and stood impassively by, gazing at
+      Harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered it, quite
+      eclipsed Harmony's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come here every morning,&rdquo; she said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the city. Her
+      quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked once into the woman's
+      eyes. After that she knew. It was on the drive back, with the little darky
+      on the box beside the driver, that Harmony got her answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande put a hand over Harmony's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We loved him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right&mdash;I was not a fit person
+      to&mdash;to have him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not that&mdash;not only that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he ever ask for me? But of course not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he had no remembrance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I loved him very much when he came,&rdquo; said Le Grande, &ldquo;although I did not
+      want him. I had been told I could have a career on the stage. Ah, my dear,
+      I chose the career&mdash;and look at me! What have I? A grave in the
+      cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by a man I loathe! If I could
+      live it over again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer was very close now:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you stay at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the boy
+      always. There is only one thing worth while&mdash;the love of a good man.
+      I have lived, lived hard. And I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But supposing that one has real ability&mdash;I mean some achievement
+      already, and a promise&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. You are a musician, I believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And&mdash;it is Dr. Byrne?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Le Grande bent forward earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My child,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if one man in all the world looked at me as your
+      doctor looks at you, I&mdash;I would be a better woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And my music?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Play for your children, as you played for my little boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting clean
+      collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like negligible garments
+      with great care and putting in his dresscoat in a roll. His pipes took
+      time, and the wooden sentry he packed with great care and a bit of healthy
+      emotion. Once or twice he came across trifles of Harmony's, and he put
+      them carefully aside&mdash;the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief, a bow
+      she had worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before and that
+      reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get away if he is to
+      keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon bow can bring that look of
+      suffering into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot, any foot at
+      all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen,&rdquo; he sang at the top of his
+      voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the air. The
+      antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in his bedroom. When
+      the wildgame seller came over for coffee there would be a discussion
+      probably. But were not the antlers of all deer similar?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portier's wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A cab,&rdquo; she announced, &ldquo;with a devil's imp on the box. Perhaps it is that
+      American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache. Harmony was
+      at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week before or the
+      undecided and troubled girl of before that. A radiant Harmony, this, who
+      stood in the doorway, who wished them good-morning, and ran up the old
+      staircase with glowing eyes and a heart that leaped and throbbed. A woman
+      now, this Harmony, one who had looked on life and learned; one who had
+      chosen her fate and was running to meet it; one who feared only death, not
+      life or anything that life could offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up&mdash;not dressed. What
+      did that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney's Point, had come across a bit of
+      paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his open trunk,
+      staring blindly at it:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H. W.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite the end now, with Harmony running across the room and dropping down
+      on her knees among a riot of garments&mdash;down on her knees, with one
+      arm round Peter's neck, drawing his tired head lower until she could kiss
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Peter, Peter, dear!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I'll love you all my life if only
+      you'll love me, and never, never let me go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter was dazed at first. He put his arms about her rather unsteadily,
+      because he had given her up and had expected to go through the rest of
+      life empty of arm and heart. And when one has one's arms set, as one may
+      say, for loneliness and relinquishment it is rather difficult&mdash;Ah,
+      but Peter got the way of it swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always,&rdquo; he said incoherently; &ldquo;forever the two of us. Whatever comes,
+      Harmony?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you'll not be sorry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if you love me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter kissed her on the eyes very solemnly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God helping me, I'll be good to you always. And I'll always love you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to hold her away from him for a moment after that, to tell her
+      what she was doing, what she was giving up. She would not be reasoned
+      with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love you,&rdquo; was her answer to every line. And it was no divided
+      allegiance she promised him. &ldquo;Career? I shall have a career. Yours!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And your music?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She colored, held him closer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;I shall tell you about that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Late winter morning in Vienna, with the school-children hurrying home, the
+      Alserstrasse alive with humanity&mdash;soldiers and chimney-sweeps,
+      housewives and beggars. Before the hospital the crowd lines up along the
+      curb; the head waiter from the coffee-house across comes to the doorway
+      and looks out. The sentry in front of the hospital ceases pacing and
+      stands at attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street a small procession comes at the double quick&mdash;a handful
+      of troopers, a black van with tiny, high-barred windows, more troopers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the van a Bulgarian spy going out to death&mdash;a swarthy little
+      man with black eyes and short, thick hands, going out like a gentleman and
+      a soldier to meet the God of patriots and lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sentry, who was only a soldier from Salzburg with one lung, was also a
+      gentleman and a patriot. He uncovered his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1214-h.htm or 1214-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/1/1214/
+
+Produced by Michael Delaney, and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/1214.txt b/old/1214.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1b3bdf0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1214.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9819 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Street of Seven Stars
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Posting Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1214]
+Release Date: February, 1998
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Delaney
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
+
+By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been
+a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game
+preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the
+building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something royal
+in the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the
+great glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling
+was mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great
+empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to
+anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
+related not a few herself.
+
+The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside
+in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the
+heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named
+Scatchett and dubbed "Scatch"--the gate slammed to and fro monotonously,
+giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched
+itself, a hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.
+
+One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of
+enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto,
+it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give
+light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still
+burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the
+disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a
+small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,--there were never enough to go
+round,--and on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned
+for the things of the flesh.
+
+The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with the
+slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft
+under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old
+floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled
+near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no
+impatience, however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put
+them together carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of
+the grand piano, anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from
+the stand.
+
+The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows, half
+a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano. There
+were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners and
+was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
+stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
+under her fingers.
+
+In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
+armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance
+of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could
+reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.
+
+The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that
+the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed
+the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let
+the initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had
+been made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what;
+and it revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of
+trunks. The girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and
+looked at the trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A
+door slammed down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into
+one of those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
+rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
+
+The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells,
+a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite "Arlesienne"
+will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
+"Siegfried" will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more
+than once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of
+early rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with
+stiffened fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a
+stove, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once
+pink butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls,
+and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in
+the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves
+and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down
+the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German,
+helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one
+might practice peacefully.
+
+Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
+from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
+listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he
+shook his fist up the stone staircase.
+
+"Gott im Himmel!" he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of
+his mustache bandage, "what a people, these Americans! So much noise and
+no music!"
+
+"And mad!" grumbled his wife. "All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
+night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it."
+
+And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going
+back to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch
+was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her
+head much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters
+had gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds
+were very low with all of them. The "Bitte zum speisen" of the little
+German maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of
+beef and carrots.
+
+Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
+never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days--a fruitcake
+from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or twice
+on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth it.
+Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and
+a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh,
+yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and
+the faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all
+had always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad--the
+expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the
+contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in
+one's mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after
+nine months of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not
+at all.
+
+Or--and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
+soul--to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
+undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony
+stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was calling
+down the hall.
+
+"Scatch," she was shouting briskly, "where is my hairbrush?"
+
+A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
+
+"I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't you got
+a comb?"
+
+"As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the teeth
+are out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look under the bed."
+
+Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
+
+"Here it is," she called joyously. "And here are Harmony's bedroom
+slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!" The girl got down off the
+chair and went to the door.
+
+"Thanks, dear," she said. "I'm coming in a minute."
+
+She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa,
+and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the
+window the air would brighten them.
+
+Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano's
+room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her
+shabby wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were
+no footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to
+the Big Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and
+held out her hand.
+
+"Look!" she said. "Under my bed! Ten kronen!"
+
+Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and
+ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the
+dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on
+which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the
+candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.
+
+"The first for a week," she said. "Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there
+may be another relic of my prosperous days."
+
+But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a
+government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen
+piece.
+
+"Where is the other?" she asked in a whisper.
+
+"In my powder-box."
+
+Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.
+
+"Every little bit," she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, "added
+to what she's got, makes just a little bit more."
+
+"Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it,
+it's good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without
+losing it now. I'll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New
+York--I haven't even a dollar for tips."
+
+"New York!" said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. "If Henry meets
+me I know he will--"
+
+"Tut!" The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. "You
+and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young
+mind that money isn't the only thing Harmony is going to need? She's
+going to be alone--and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not
+like us. You have your Henry. I'm a beefy person who has a stomach, and
+I'm thankful for it. But she is different--she's got the thing that you
+are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to
+fight in a church choir instead of grand opera."
+
+Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
+
+"Temperament?" she asked. It had always been accepted in the little
+colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser
+firmament.
+
+The Big Soprano sniffed.
+
+"If you like," she said. "Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to
+have souls, Scatchy, dear."
+
+This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was coming
+down the hall.
+
+"I thought, under her pillow," she whispered. "She'll find it--"
+
+Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame
+of a candle.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having
+seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back
+alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were
+gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little
+Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry's arms about her,
+had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears
+of paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets
+were still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the
+room.
+
+Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense
+of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming
+gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place
+at best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door,
+eyes and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure
+had stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment
+the gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind
+her.
+
+The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his
+mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented
+when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early
+morning practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he
+cherished a hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was
+for her he wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day--hopefully! One
+must be ready!
+
+The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the
+five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece
+of his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a
+gesture.
+
+"Bitte, Fraulein!" he said through the bandage. "It is for me a pleasure
+to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup."
+
+The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over
+his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to
+Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could
+not but she held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in
+his best manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the
+stone staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her
+with his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
+
+The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting
+to Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out
+into the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the
+shadows, and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.
+
+It was when--having picked up her violin in a very passion of
+loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds
+echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms--it was when she was
+ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl
+from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having
+adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the
+gifted:--
+
+DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am
+honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if
+you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this
+pleasure. Harry, you have it--the real thing, you know, whatever it
+is--and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go
+now, just when lessons would mean everything--well, you must not think
+of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or
+at least--well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by being
+careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but it may help.
+Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and it may be yours
+anyhow.
+
+"Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things about our
+leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You are so beautiful,
+Harry,--although you never let us tell you so. And Sadie says you have
+a soul and I haven't, and that souls are deadly things to have. I feel
+to-night that in urging you to stay I am taking the burden of your soul
+on me! Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you
+call a policeman. And be sure you get into a respectable pension. There
+are queer ones.
+
+"Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from
+home--you said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?--and will
+keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go
+wrong--. But perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any case, of course
+it's a loan, and you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours
+by sending it back when you get to work to make your fortune. And if you
+are doubtful at all, just remember that hopeful little mother of yours
+who sent you over to get what she had never been able to have for
+herself, and who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and
+she named you Harmony.
+
+"I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.
+
+"SCATCH."
+
+That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson
+feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in
+the draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony
+fought her battle. And a battle it was. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had
+not known everything. There had been no insurance on her father's life;
+the little mother was penniless. A married sister would care for her,
+but what then? Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to
+take her home, and she had--the hoard under the pillow. To go back and
+teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be presented,
+as he had promised her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the
+prestige at home that that would mean, and its resulting possibility of
+fame and fortune--which?
+
+She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she could
+teach English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some of the stores
+advertised "English Spoken." That would be something to fall back on, a
+clerkship during the day.
+
+Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the
+Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and
+comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with
+most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which
+reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather
+frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.
+
+She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet
+under her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out
+into the cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall
+and listened. She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the
+barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in
+his night attire, his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face
+upraised to the floor above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
+
+When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly.
+His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand. She eyed
+him.
+
+"So! It is the American Fraulein now!"
+
+"I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music." He
+fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one
+eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.
+
+"She leaves to-day," she announced, ignoring the knot.
+
+"Why? She is alone. Rosa says--"
+
+"She leaves to-day!"
+
+The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth compactness.
+The Portier jerked at it.
+
+"No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I
+last night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair
+after her! A man in the gateway!"
+
+The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage, which
+had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.
+
+"She will stay if she so desire," he muttered furiously, and, raising
+the knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and
+sweetly up-curled, stood revealed.
+
+"She will stay!" he repeated. "And when you see men at the gate, let me
+know. She is an angel!"
+
+"And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?"
+
+This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from
+telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one's heart.
+Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day--Himmel, the girl must
+go!
+
+Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and
+expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere a tiny
+room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly
+to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not
+annoy people, that was important.
+
+She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa
+wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it
+was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city--young girls
+of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!
+
+Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she
+could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went down
+to interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the owner
+for the old house.
+
+The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He looked
+past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that the lease was
+up and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight she was not so like
+the angel, and after all she could only play the violin. The angel had
+a voice, such a voice! And besides, there was an eye at the crack of the
+door.
+
+The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a heavy heart
+that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper quarters.
+
+Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
+cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the gutters
+were frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in the mountains the
+day before and hanging from a hook before a wild-game shop, was frozen
+quite stiff. It was a pretty creature. The girl turned her eyes away. A
+young man, buying cheese and tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.
+
+"That's an American girl, isn't it?" he asked in American-German.
+
+The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him, and Rosa
+talked. When the American left the shop he knew everything of Harmony
+that Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called her "The Beautiful One."
+Also he was short one krone four beliers in his change, which is readily
+done when a customer is plainly thinking of a "beautiful one."
+
+Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a stove and
+no objection to practicing. There were plenty--but the rates! The
+willow plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of making the plainest
+garments appear costly. Landladies looked at the plume and the suit and
+heard the soft swish of silk beneath, which marks only self-respect in
+the American woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their
+regular terms until poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then
+at last toward evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the
+corner of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing,
+and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for
+earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.
+
+A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the
+center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear
+higher than the other and twisted one's nose. But there was an odor
+of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many
+previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco.
+Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather faint.
+
+She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity
+of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or
+twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her
+eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a
+cheese and some tinned fish under his arm.
+
+He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.
+
+"Not ill, are you?" he asked in English, and then remembering. "Bist du
+krank?" He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity
+of the "du."
+
+Harmony smiled faintly.
+
+"Only tired," she said in English. "And the odor of cabbage--".
+
+Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand.
+He whistled softly. He had recognized her.
+
+"Cabbage, of course!" he said. "The pension upstairs is full of it.
+I live there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served up with
+pork."
+
+"I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?"
+
+He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.
+
+"So bad," he observed, "that I keep body and soul together by buying
+strong and odorous food at the delicatessens--odorous, because only
+rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only
+thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese
+has retired defeated."
+
+"But I don't like cheese." In sheer relief from the loneliness of the
+day her spirits were rising.
+
+"Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I
+say--" He hesitated.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Would you--don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?"
+
+"It sounds attractive,"--uncertainly.
+
+"Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?"
+
+Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see
+this brisk young American--young, she knew by his voice, tall by his
+silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could not see his
+face, but she liked his voice.
+
+"Do you mean--with you?"
+
+"I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription."
+
+That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
+legitimate friends in need.
+
+"I am sure it is not proper, but--"
+
+"Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for professional
+services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced to-night by the
+landlady? Come now--to the coffee-house and the Paris edition of the
+'Herald'!" But the next moment he paused and ran his hand over his chin.
+"I'm pretty disreputable," he explained. "I have been in a clinic all
+day, and, hang it all, I'm not shaved."
+
+"What difference does that make?"
+
+"My dear young lady," he explained gravely, picking up the cheese and
+the tinned fish, "it makes a difference in me that I wish you to realize
+before you see me in a strong light."
+
+He rapped at the Portier's door, with the intention of leaving his
+parcels there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his arm. A
+moment later Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a bit excited,
+and lovely with the color the adventure brought into her face. Her
+companion walked beside her, tall, slightly stooped. She essayed a
+fugitive little side-glance up at him, and meeting his eyes hastily
+averted hers.
+
+They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the girl's mind
+little Scatchett's letter.
+
+"Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you, call a
+policeman."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were
+gathered miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly
+men--uniformed officers, who made of the neighborhood coffee-house a
+sort of club, where under their breath they criticized the Government
+and retailed small regimental gossip; professors from the university,
+still wearing under the beards of middle life the fine horizontal scars
+of student days; elderly doctors from the general hospital across the
+street; even a Hofrath or two, drinking beer and reading the "Fliegende
+Blaetter" and "Simplicissimus"; and in an alcove round a billiard table
+a group of noisy Korps students. Over all a permeating odor of coffee,
+strong black coffee, made with a fig or two to give it color. It rose
+even above the blue tobacco haze and dominated the atmosphere with
+its spicy and stimulating richness. A bustle of waiters, a hum of
+conversation, the rattle of newspapers and the click of billiard
+balls--this was the coffee-house.
+
+Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony had
+been a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American integrity, in
+spite of the salon of Maria Theresa and three expensive lessons a week
+in German. Harmony knew the art galleries and the churches, which were
+free, and the opera, thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone
+of Austrian life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.
+
+Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and disappeared
+for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of the "Herald." The
+girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the bright electric lights,
+he was not handsome, hardly good-looking. His mouth was wide, his nose
+irregular, his hair a nondescript brown,--but the mouth had humor, the
+nose character, and, thank Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that
+Harmony saw all this at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables,
+with a nod here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect--a
+tall man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall
+men are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!
+
+The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the points
+of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak to him. The
+shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly the revelation
+was an easement to the girl's nervousness. This smiling and unpressed
+individual, blithely waving aloft the Paris edition of the "Herald" and
+equally blithely ignoring the maledictions of the student from whom
+he had taken it--even Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or
+threatened him with the police.
+
+He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to
+interfere with her outlook over the room.
+
+"Warmer?" he asked.
+
+"Very much."
+
+"Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They know me
+here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest cakes for me.
+Don't let me bother you; go on and read. See which of the smart set is
+getting a divorce--or is it always the same one? And who's President
+back home."
+
+"I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?"
+
+"Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take back
+to America with me--one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local
+color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's wife to sit in the
+cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll grow wealthy."
+
+"But what about the medical practice?"
+
+He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous
+promise of his mouth.
+
+"Why, it will work out perfectly," he said whimsically. "The great
+American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the
+feeble American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office
+across the street!"
+
+After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation
+until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her
+with comfortable satisfaction.
+
+"Nod your head but don't speak," he said. "Remember, I am prescribing,
+and there's to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or
+shall I not open the cheese?"
+
+But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something
+inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional
+swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the
+paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded
+room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on
+Harmony's lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes
+that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to
+shift his gaze.
+
+The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the
+unknown protested.
+
+"The function of a coffee-house," he explained gravely, "is twofold.
+Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation."
+
+"I converse very badly."
+
+"So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that well.
+Shall I commence?"
+
+Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why choke
+over conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It was warm
+there, with the heater at her back; better than the little room with the
+sagging bed and the doors covered with wall paper. Her feet had stopped
+aching, too, She could have sat there for hours. And--why evade it?--she
+was interested. This whimsical and respectful young man with his absurd
+talk and his shabby clothes had roused her curiosity.
+
+"Please," she assented.
+
+"Then, first of all, my name. I'm getting that over early, because it
+isn't much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don't shudder."
+
+"Certainly I'm not shuddering."
+
+"I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a German
+uncle of my mother's. Augustus! It's rather a mess. What shall I put on
+my professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus Byrne nobody's fooled.
+They know my wretched first name is Peter."
+
+"Or Patrick."
+
+"I rather like Patrick--if I thought it might pass as Patrick! Patrick
+has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that's not bad. But
+Peter!"
+
+"Do you know," Harmony confessed half shyly, "I like Peter as a name."
+
+"Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as Peter
+Byrne. The rest doesn't amount to much, but I want you to know it, since
+you have been good enough to accept me on faith. I'm here alone, from
+a little town in eastern Ohio; worked my way through a coeducational
+college in the West and escaped unmarried; did two years in a drygoods
+store until, by saving and working in my vacations, I got through
+medical college and tried general practice. Didn't like it--always
+wanted to do surgery. A little legacy from the German uncle, trying to
+atone for the 'Augustus,' gave me enough money to come here. I've got a
+chance with the Days--surgeons, you know--when I go back, if I can hang
+on long enough. That's all. Here's a traveler's check with my name on
+it, to vouch for the truth of this thrilling narrative. Gaze on it with
+awe; there are only a few of them left!"
+
+Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as the
+strings of her own violin, and under the even lightness of his tone she
+felt many things that met a response in her--loneliness and struggle,
+and the ever-present anxiety about money, grim determination, hope and
+fear, and even occasional despair. He was still young, but there were
+lines in his face and a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less
+frank, she would have known soon enough--the dingy little pension, the
+shabby clothes--
+
+She held out her hand.
+
+"Thank you for telling me," she said simply. "I think I understand very
+well because--it's music with me: violin. And my friends have gone, so I
+am alone, too."
+
+He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd without
+seeing it.
+
+"It's curious, isn't it?" he said. "Here we are, you and I, meeting
+in the center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief, both working our
+heads off for an idea that may never pan out! Why aren't you at home
+to-night, eating a civilized beefsteak and running upstairs to get ready
+for a nice young man to bring you a box of chocolates? Why am I not
+measuring out calico in Shipley & West's? Instead, we are going to
+Frau Schwarz', to listen to cold ham and scorched compote eaten in six
+different languages."
+
+Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She was
+drawing on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the crowd.
+
+Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then,
+seeing Byrne, he waved a greeting to him. Byrne's eyes, from being
+introspective, became watchful.
+
+The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with black hair
+and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He was not alone. A
+slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic, rose when he did and threw
+away the end of a cigarette.
+
+"Why do we go so soon?" she demanded fretfully in German. "It is early
+still."
+
+He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and eminently
+satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke the other's
+language.
+
+"Because, my beloved," he said lightly, "you are smoking a great many
+poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to speak to
+Peter."
+
+The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.
+
+"Who is that with Peter?"
+
+"We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a woman at
+last!"
+
+The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with a slow
+and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed him, and paused
+to apologize, to the officer's delight and her escort's irritation. And
+Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line of annoyance between his brows.
+The girl was ahead; that complicated things.
+
+When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily, with a
+word of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done. He had taken
+the little Austrian's arm and led her by the table while he was still
+greeting her. He held her in conversation in his absurd German until
+they had reached the swinging doors, while her companion followed
+helplessly. And he bowed her out, protesting his undying admiration for
+her eyes, while the florid youth alternately raged behind him and stared
+back at Harmony, interested and unconscious behind her table.
+
+The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned, unsmiling, to
+the other man.
+
+"That won't do, you know, Stewart," he said, grave but not unfriendly.
+
+"The Kid wouldn't bite her."
+
+"We'll not argue about it."
+
+After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.
+
+"Certainly not," he agreed cheerfully. "That is up to you, of course. I
+didn't know. We're looking for you to-night."
+
+A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne, but the
+situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.
+
+"I'll be round," he said. "I have a lecture and I may be late, but I'll
+come."
+
+The "Kid" was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air,
+angrily flushed.
+
+"You saw!" she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand
+through her arm. "He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before
+I knew you--"
+
+"Before you knew me, little one," he said cheerfully, "you were exactly
+what you are now."
+
+She paused on the curb and raised her voice.
+
+"So! And what is that?"
+
+"Beautiful as the stars, only--not so remote."
+
+In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The
+"beautiful" calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her
+suspicion.
+
+"Remote? What is that?"
+
+"I was thinking of Worthington."
+
+The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.
+
+In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of
+soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement
+and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He
+drew his chin into the up-turned collar of his overcoat and waited, an
+absurdly patient figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided
+into a rain of tears. Then he took the girl's elbow again and led her,
+childishly weeping, into a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and
+eyes of the Alserstrasse.
+
+Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was
+closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or
+of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather
+puzzled at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation.
+He had suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller's
+narrative of Rosa's account of the disrupted colony across in the old
+lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the
+dark entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
+light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the
+emotional coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God
+save the mark!--her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted
+it: his responsibility, if you please.
+
+He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly well--enough to
+love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and
+passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them,
+or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament;
+the all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher
+than others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt
+Theater, where he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had
+known in Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking
+her own meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater
+she had worn a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.
+
+Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its years
+of coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's new resolution
+that night: this poverty adopting poverty, this youth adopting youth,
+with the altruistic purpose of saving it from itself.
+
+And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story or knew
+her name, Rosa having called her "The Beautiful One" in her narrative,
+and the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition.
+
+Back to "The Beautiful One" went Peter Byrne, and, true to his new part
+of protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and tried to look much
+older than he really was, and responsible. The result was a grimness
+that alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten proprieties.
+
+"I think I must go," she said hurriedly, after a glance at his
+determinedly altruistic profile. "I must finish packing my things. The
+Portier has promised--"
+
+"Go! Why, you haven't even told me your name!"
+
+"Frau Schwarz will present you to-night," primly and rising.
+
+Peter Byrne rose, too.
+
+"I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely yard
+alone after dark."
+
+"Yard! How do you know that?"
+
+Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set on the
+heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of dissolution. It
+took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally furnished an inspiration. He
+indicated it airily.
+
+"Saw you this morning coming out--delicatessen shop across the street,"
+he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty which the girl's
+eyes seemed somehow to compel: "That's true, but it's not all the truth.
+I was on the bus last night, and when you got off alone I--I saw you
+were an American, and that's not a good neighborhood. I took the liberty
+of following you to your gate!"
+
+He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and said so.
+And in her gratitude she made no objection to his suggestion that he see
+her safely to the old lodge and help her carry her hand-luggage and her
+violin to the pension. He paid the trifling score, and followed by many
+eyes in the room they went out into the crisp night together.
+
+At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of scrubbing
+showed that the Portier's wife was preparing for the inspection of
+possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the stairs by the light of
+a candle, and the steam of the hot water on the cold marble invested her
+like an aura. She stood aside to let them pass, and then went cumbrously
+down the stairs to where, a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other,
+the Portier was frying chops for the evening meal.
+
+"What have I said?" she demanded from the doorway. "Your angel is here."
+
+"So!"
+
+"She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you refuse,
+because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is again here, and
+with a man!"
+
+"It is the way of the young and beautiful--there is always a man," said
+the Portier, turning a chop.
+
+His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away,
+exasperated.
+
+"It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate," she threw back
+over her shoulder. "I knew it from the first; but you, great booby, can
+see nothing but red lips. Bah!"
+
+Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and
+freezing cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter Byrne
+sat and waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the Street of
+Seven Stars, the arc lights swung in the wind.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz, much
+crimped and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head of the long
+table. There were few, almost no Americans, the Americans flocking to
+good food at reckless prices in more fashionable pensions; to the Frau
+Gallitzenstein's, for instance, in the Kochgasse, where there was to
+be had real beefsteak, where turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and
+Christmas, and where, were one so minded, one might revel in whipped
+cream.
+
+The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the center
+of the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with wire stems and
+green paper leaves, and over the side-table, with its luxury of compote
+in tall glass dishes and its wealth of small hard cakes, there hung
+a framed motto which said, "Nicht Rauchen," "No Smoking,"--and which
+looked suspiciously as if it had once adorned a compartment of a
+railroad train.
+
+Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a
+careful toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But he had
+gone further: He had discovered, for the first time in the three months
+of its defection, a button missing from his coat, and had set about to
+replace it. He had cut a button from another coat, by the easy method
+of amputating it with a surgical bistoury, and had sewed it in its new
+position with a curved surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized
+catgut. The operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with
+the aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he tied
+the ends in a surgeon's knot underneath and stood back to consider the
+result. It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous. After a moment or two of
+troubled thought he blacked the white catgut with a dot of ink and went
+on his way rejoicing.
+
+Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the course he
+had laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive line of thought as
+he dressed. When he was not smoking he was whistling, and when he was
+doing neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers,
+he was swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The
+materials for a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an
+obelisk in a cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive,
+and hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open--one
+window, to be exact, the room being very small--and spends most of the
+day in a warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.
+
+To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except
+subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step by
+step, the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon, weighing,
+considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached as he brushed
+back his hair and put away his sewing implements, was somewhat to the
+effect that he could have done a better piece of work with his eyes
+shut and his hands tied behind his back; and that if it were not for the
+wealth of material to work on he'd pack up and go home. Which brought
+him back to Harmony and his new responsibility. He took off the necktie
+he had absently put on and hunted out a better one.
+
+He was late at supper--an offense that brought a scowl from the head
+of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile. Harmony was
+already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish
+student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of
+language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to
+be again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly,
+aware of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did
+not understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and
+failing that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the
+day. Her bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and rather aloof.
+She ate almost nothing, and left the table before the others had
+finished.
+
+What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing eyes!
+What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with dessert! What
+heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted eyes, looking
+away from appealing ones; lips that tremble with wretchedness nibbling
+daintily at a morsel; smiles that sear; foolish bits of talk that mean
+nothing except to one, and to that one everything! Harmony, freezing at
+Peter's formal bow and gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the
+meal, or no nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering
+the little Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope of a
+glance. And over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the "Nicht Rauchen"
+sign, and an acrimonious discussion on eugenics between an American
+woman doctor named Gates and a German matron who had had fifteen
+children, and who reduced every general statement to a personal insult.
+
+Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed, and she
+was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one. Defiantly, too, had he
+only known it, her small chin up and her color high again; playing the
+"Humoresque," of all things, in the hope, of course, that he would
+hear it and guess from her choice the wild merriment of her mood. Peter
+rapped once or twice, but obtained no answer, save that the "Humoresque"
+rose a bit higher; and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he
+was forced to light a cigarette to cover his pausing.
+
+Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman of
+forty or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a masculine
+disregard of clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let him help her into
+her ulster.
+
+"New girl, eh?" she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door. "Very
+gay, isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that! Honestly,
+Peter, what are we going to do?"
+
+"Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better food, but
+not for our terms."
+
+Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put it on
+with a single jerk down over her hair.
+
+"Oh, darn money, anyhow!" she said. "Come and walk to the corner with
+me. I have a lecture."
+
+Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his room.
+There, on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he wrote--
+
+"Are you ill? Or have I done anything?"
+
+"P. B."
+
+This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the little
+Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said nothing, nor did
+Peter, who rose and dusted his knees. The little Bulgarian spoke no
+English and little German. Between them was the wall of language. But
+higher than this barrier was the understanding of their common sex. He
+held out his hand, still smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took
+it. Then he followed the woman doctor down the stairs.
+
+To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be
+absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts
+an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he
+had offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his
+interest. But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and
+intelligent notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his
+enjoyment of the Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed
+down its involved German.
+
+The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not approve of
+Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of
+fineness in the man himself--an intangible thing that seems to be a
+matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of
+the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.
+
+Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked
+to Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise
+combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that, and the recollection
+that it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics,
+no lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down
+and that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was
+whistling as he walked along.
+
+Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped
+under a street light to consult his watch.
+
+"Almost ten!" he said. "I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie
+I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart."
+
+"Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?"
+
+"Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make a good
+woman understand that sort of thing."
+
+"Thank God for that!"
+
+After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the
+"Humoresque."
+
+Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was
+to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights
+were still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs
+and, for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced
+as out of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.
+
+"'Out of order'!" he observed. "Out of order since last spring, judging
+by that card. Vorwarts!"
+
+They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer played
+golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a
+driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to
+forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular
+development that his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails,
+without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the long steep flights with an
+elasticity that left even Boyer a step or so behind.
+
+Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat
+replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with
+smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the
+sound of beer mugs on wood.
+
+Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men
+bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and
+bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.
+
+"What do I smell, Marie?" he demanded. "Surely not sausages!"
+
+Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old
+friend. It was always sausages.
+
+"Sausages, of a truth--fat ones.'
+
+"But surely not with mustard?"
+
+"Ach, ja--englisch mustard."
+
+Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on
+Byrne's arm.
+
+"I was very angry with you to-day."
+
+"With me?"
+
+Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's unconventional
+menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of addressing Marie in
+English, while she replied in her own tongue.
+
+"Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and
+you--She is rich, so?"
+
+"I really don't know. I think not."
+
+"And good?"
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking
+up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard.
+Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She
+had put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones
+were small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.
+
+"I was sad to-night," she said plaintively. "I wished to jump out the
+window."
+
+Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.
+
+"And I made you feel like that?"
+
+"Not you--the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I--" She stopped
+tragically, then sniffled.
+
+"The sausages!" she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the
+kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.
+
+Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in
+Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could
+teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of
+clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing,
+offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of
+overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness
+of the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies
+that others may live.
+
+Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness
+which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of
+ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming
+egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.
+
+His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in
+Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means
+at his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne
+was living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in
+winter, starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.
+
+The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury
+of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water
+on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with
+premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been
+a fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a
+reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at
+the same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub
+sizzled if one touched it.
+
+Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom;
+the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress,
+which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again,
+opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room,
+now in chaotic disorder.
+
+Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men already
+there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing
+research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from
+Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne
+stood by waiting for the hand to be played.
+
+The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority. It was
+a regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat
+in Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie's boiled Wiener
+sausages.
+
+The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers.
+MacLean, who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in chips
+with quick gestures of his long pianist's fingers.
+
+Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out, and so,
+after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and fell to betting.
+Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe, and after a second's
+hesitation Byrne turned to him.
+
+"I don't know just what to say, Stewart," he began in an undertone. "I'm
+sorry. I didn't want to hurt Marie, but--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right." Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward to
+watch the game with an air of ending the discussion.
+
+"Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been kind
+to me, and I like her. You know that."
+
+"Don't be an ass!" Stewart turned on him sharply. "Marie is a little
+fool, that's all. I didn't know it was an American girl."
+
+Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He stayed
+out of the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about the room. He
+glanced into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where Marie hovered over
+the stove.
+
+She turned and saw him.
+
+"Come," she called. "Watch the supper for me while I go down for more
+beer."
+
+"But no," he replied, imitating her tone. "Watch the supper for me while
+I go down for more beer."
+
+"I love thee," she called merrily. "Tell the Herr Doktor I love thee.
+And here is the pitcher."
+
+When he returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The
+cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing
+the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a
+pinnacle of proprietorship.
+
+"Exactly," he was saying, in reply to something gone before; "I used
+to come here Saturday nights--used to come early and take a bath.
+Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit in a corner
+and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp there, and decent food,
+and a bed that didn't suffer from necrosis in the center. Then when he
+was called home I took it."
+
+"Girl and all, wasn't it?"
+
+"Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she is. He
+came back last fall on his wedding trip--he married a wealthy girl and
+came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here. There was the deuce to
+pay."
+
+He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.
+
+"Jealous, eh?" from Hunter.
+
+"Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him--said he didn't
+respect her!"
+
+"It's a curious code of honor," said Boyer thoughtfully. And indeed to
+none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl of the streets,
+driven by God knows what necessity to make her own code and, having made
+it, living up to it with every fiber of her.
+
+"Bitte zum speisen!" called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and the
+men trooped out to the kitchen.
+
+The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in the
+center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and above all
+sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer, as did the
+others, and sang German songs with a frightful accent and much vigor and
+sentiment, as also did the others.
+
+Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and told
+himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like a prince
+for the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the hollow center of
+his bed, where his big figure fitted as comfortably as though it lay in
+a washtub, and before his eyes there came a vision of Stewart's flat and
+the slippers by the fire--which was eminently human.
+
+However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with considerable
+vigor, that he'd be damned if he would--which was eminently Peter Byrne.
+Almost immediately, with the bed coverings, augmented by his overcoat,
+drawn snug to his chin, and the better necktie swinging from the gasjet
+in the air from the opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours he
+had entirely forgotten Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the little
+Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a shawl over her
+shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire, while in the dining-room
+the little chambermaid cut butter and divided it sparingly among a dozen
+breakfast trays--on each tray two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate,
+a cup. On two trays Olga, with a glance over her shoulder, placed two
+butter pats. The mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a
+keen eye for butter--and a hard heart.
+
+Katrina came to the door.
+
+"The hot water is ready," she announced. "And the coffee also. Hast thou
+been to mass?"
+
+"Ja."
+
+"That is a lie." This quite on general principle, it being one of the
+cook's small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her underling,
+and one of Olga's Sunday morning's indulgences to oversleep and avoid
+the mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and without reply, being
+occupied at that moment in standing between Katrina and the extra pats
+of butter.
+
+"For the lie," said Katrina calmly, "thou shalt have no butter this
+morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it, wicked one!"
+
+Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.
+
+"The new Fraulein is American?"
+
+"Ja."
+
+Katrina shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Then I shall put more water to heat," she said resignedly. "The
+Americans use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!"
+
+Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood with it
+poised in her thin young arms.
+
+"The new Fraulein is very beautiful," she continued aloud. "Thinkest
+thou it is the hot water?"
+
+"Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?" demanded Katrina. "Go, and
+be less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who rings, but the new
+American."
+
+Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony's door, and being bidden, entered.
+The room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her nightgown, was
+closing the outer casement. The inner still swung open. Olga, having put
+down her pitcher, shivered.
+
+"Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?"
+
+"Always with open windows." Harmony having secured the inner casement,
+was wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the faded butterflies.
+Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh. She shook her head.
+
+"But the air of the night," she said, "it is full of mists and
+illnesses! Will you have breakfast now?"
+
+"In ten minutes, after I have bathed."
+
+Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen, shaking
+her head.
+
+"They are strange, the Americans!" she said to latrine. "And if to be
+lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows--"
+
+Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had passed
+with the reading of his note, and the sensation of his protection and
+nearness had been almost physical. In the virginal little apartment in
+the lodge of Maria Theresa the only masculine presence had been that
+of the Portier, carrying up coals at ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the
+accompanist who each alternate day had played for the Big Soprano to
+practice. And they had felt no deprivation, except for those occasional
+times when Scatchy developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a
+dancing-hall or one of the little theaters that opened after the opera.
+
+But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman or
+disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown herself
+on the protection of this shabby big American whom she had met but
+once, and, having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of course, that
+she realized her dependence. She had felt very old and experienced and
+exceedingly courageous as she put out her light the night before and
+took a flying leap into the bed. She was still old and experienced, if a
+trifle less courageous, that Sunday morning.
+
+Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls, two pats
+of butter--shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina the thrifty--and
+a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper torn from a notebook:--
+
+"Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company. Will
+you walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to ask you, but
+am spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one remaining American
+suit is being pressed.
+
+"P. B."
+
+Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:--
+
+"You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+"H. W."
+
+When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway told
+Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her violin.
+The idea of work obsessed her. To-morrow there would be the hunt for
+something to do to supplement her resources, this afternoon she had
+rashly promised to walk. The morning, then, must be given up to work.
+But after all she did little.
+
+For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused outside
+her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter Byrne, listening
+while he sorted lecture memoranda at his little table in bathrobe and
+slippers, absently filed the little note with the others--where he came
+across it months later--next to a lecture on McBurney's Point, and spent
+a sad hour or so over it. Over all the sordid little pension, with its
+odors of food and stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial
+flowers, the music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.
+
+In her room across from Harmony's, Anna Gates was sewing, or preparing
+to sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the room in violent
+disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting savagely at a roll of
+pink flannel. Because she was working with curved surgeon's scissors,
+borrowed from Peter, the cut edges were strangely scalloped. Her method
+as well as her tools was unique. Clearly she was intent on a body
+garment, for now and then she picked up the flannel and held it to her.
+Having thus, as one may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to
+cut again, jaw tight set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a small
+replica of Peter Byrne sewing a button on his coat.
+
+After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong. She
+rolled up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner, and
+proceeded to her Sunday morning occupation of putting away the garments
+she had worn during the week, a vast and motley collection.
+
+On the irritability of her mood Harmony's music had a late but certain
+effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than usual, seeing that
+she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly picked up the bundle from
+the corner. She hunted about for a thimble, being certain she had
+brought one from home a year before, but failed to find it. And finally,
+bundle under her arm and smiling, she knocked at Harmony's door.
+
+"Would you mind letting me sit with you?" she asked. "I'll not stir. I
+want to sew, and my room is such a mess!"
+
+Harmony threw the door wide. "You will make me very happy, if only my
+practicing does not disturb you."
+
+Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.
+
+"I'll probably be the disturbing element," she said. "I'm a noisy
+sewer."
+
+Harmony's immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor
+immediately. She borrowed a thimble--not because she cared whether
+she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the
+game--and settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For
+an hour she plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her
+bow and turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in
+her thread.
+
+"It's in the most damnable knot!" she said, and Harmony was suddenly
+aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.
+
+"Please don't pay any attention to me," she implored. "I hate to sew.
+That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool
+about music."
+
+"Perhaps, if you hate to sew--"
+
+"I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate
+being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and
+clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse
+and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!"
+
+Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next
+moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was
+smiling up through her glasses.
+
+"The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm
+really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad
+and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own
+cooking, but what time have I?" She spread out the pieces of flannel on
+her knee. "Does this look like anything to you?"
+
+"A petticoat, isn't it?"
+
+"I didn't intend it as a petticoat."
+
+"I thought, on account of the scallops--"
+
+"Scallops!" Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from
+them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.
+
+"Scallops!" she gasped at last. "Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting
+'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!"
+
+Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately
+flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little
+adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to
+Peter--Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his
+hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel
+Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had
+the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been
+carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back
+on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces,
+united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the
+hospital. "Although," she commented, "it looks more like a chair cover."
+
+Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined
+with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the
+crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the
+mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart.
+And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than
+questioning, the faded little woman doctor knew all the story.
+
+She was rather aghast.
+
+"But suppose you cannot find anything to do?"
+
+"I must," simply.
+
+"It's such a terrible city for a girl alone."
+
+"I'm not really alone. I know you now."
+
+"An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!"
+
+"And there is Peter Byrne."
+
+"Peter!" Dr. Gates sniffed. "Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any
+comparison in destitution!"
+
+Harmony stiffened a trifle.
+
+"Of course I do not mean money," she said. "There are such things as
+encouragement, and--and friendliness."
+
+"One cannot eat encouragement," retorted Dr. Gates sagely. "And
+friendliness between you and any man--bah! Even Peter is only human, my
+dear."
+
+"I am sure he is very good."
+
+"So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I'm a
+skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall in love with
+him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't let him fall in
+love with you. He probably will."
+
+Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare
+for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that
+a headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised.
+Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the
+afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.
+
+Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner
+she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for
+the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty.
+For illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the
+spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of
+general practice, had come to view life along physiological lines.
+
+With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.
+
+"I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual."
+
+"Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life--"
+
+"About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool."
+
+Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best
+tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment
+she thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I said you were
+only human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil--"
+
+"I cannot imagine," said Peter slowly, "the reason for any conversation
+about me."
+
+"Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it
+always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then
+she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody
+was good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well."
+
+"So you warned her against me," said Peter grimly.
+
+"I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make
+'way with myself?"
+
+"Cui bono?" demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. "The mischief
+is done."
+
+Dr. Gates looked up at him.
+
+"I'm in love with you myself, Peter!" she said gratefully. "Perhaps it
+is the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold
+water that evening and obeyed little Olga's "Bitte sum speisen." The
+chairs round the dining-table were only half occupied--a free concert
+had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly
+considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of
+the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room
+far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what
+he had learned during the week--his gleanings from near-by tables in
+coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe,
+where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.
+
+Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met
+a tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was
+talking volubly--as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the
+scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the
+girl. Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of
+the intimacy of the day before.
+
+"Better?"
+
+"Not entirely. Somewhat."
+
+"I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer
+from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them."
+
+"I am afraid of headache tablets."
+
+"Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!"
+
+This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what
+had she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her
+physician. That was all.
+
+"The next time I shall send Olga."
+
+"Good!" he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as
+he might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her
+new-growing confidence.
+
+It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a
+cigarette--according to the custom of the pension, which accorded the
+"Nicht Rauchen" sign the same attention that it did to the portrait of
+the deceased Herr Schwarz--that he turned to her again.
+
+"I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night."
+
+Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved
+herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.
+
+"Then you do not prescribe air?"
+
+"That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind my
+going along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else to do."
+
+Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a swift
+glance of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather
+exultant himself; certainly he had been adroit.
+
+"I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep," said Harmony,
+who had missed the by-play. "And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice
+companion, I'm sure."
+
+It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter
+had she followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction
+mattering little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking
+of immaterial things--of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of
+the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the
+Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the
+Benk sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting
+diplomacy to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out
+what was in his heart.
+
+"Look here," he said, "you don't care a rap about spires. I don't
+believe you know anything about them. I don't. What did that idiot of a
+woman doctor say to you to-day?"
+
+"I don't know what you mean."
+
+"You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out with
+two premises: I'm a man, and you're young and attractive. Then she draws
+some sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?"
+
+"I don't see why we need discuss it," said poor Harmony. "Or how you
+know--"
+
+"I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she
+came to me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to you or not,
+but--we'd started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear
+girl, you are beautiful and I know it. That's all the more reason why,
+if you'll stand for it, you need some one to look after you--I'll not
+say like a brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor
+brothers to their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and
+who isn't going to fall in love with you."
+
+"I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you
+to."
+
+"Certainly not. Besides, I--" Here Peter Byrne had another inspiration,
+not so good as the first--"Besides, there is somebody at home, you
+understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?"
+
+"A girl at home?"
+
+"A girl," said Peter, lying manfully.
+
+"How very nice!" said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all
+sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of
+their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers
+and street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to
+themselves. Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked
+blissful personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money--or
+its lack--their ambitions, their hopes, even--and here was intimacy,
+indeed!--their disappointments, their failures of courage, their
+occasional loss of faith in themselves.
+
+The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward
+the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a
+chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of
+the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took
+on, against the gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for
+an occasional pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the
+streets were deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl
+rejected his offer of a taxicab.
+
+"We should be home too quickly," she observed naively. "And we have
+so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English
+lessons in the afternoon and working all morning at my music--"
+
+And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely,
+his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what
+a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very
+slender her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.
+
+Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep
+into his soul that night.
+
+Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a
+friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they
+were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned
+in at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided
+with Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled
+mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin
+heart in his voice, the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann. He saw
+Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would
+have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.
+
+"It is only the Portier from the lodge," she said.
+
+The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note,
+stood before Harmony, bowing.
+
+"The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad," he said thickly. "There is no
+more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has
+only one lung."
+
+"But think!" Harmony said in German. "No more practicing in the early
+dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is
+better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!"
+
+Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and
+bowed after them.
+
+"Gute Nacht," he called. "Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the
+salon and a bath of the finest."
+
+As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his
+unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the
+Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.
+
+"Do you mind if I ask one question?"
+
+"You honor me, madam."
+
+"Then--what is the name of the girl back home?"
+
+Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine
+names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:--
+
+"Emma."
+
+"Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!" But there was a touch of
+disappointment in her voice.
+
+Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the
+master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a
+grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano
+had been right--she had the real thing.
+
+The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself
+to an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the
+anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his
+rare enthusiasms.
+
+"Six months," he said, "and you will go back to your America and show
+them how over here we teach violin. I will a letter--letters--give you,
+and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my
+pupil, is it not so?"
+
+Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with
+the praise and excitement.
+
+"If I can stay so long," she answered unsteadily.
+
+"You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished
+you talk of going! Gott im Himmel!"
+
+"It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something
+to do I shall have to go back."
+
+The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse
+his ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He
+spent five minutes in indignant protest, then:--
+
+"But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay.
+Perhaps I can now and then find a concert for you." It was a lure he
+had thrown out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being
+always eagerly swallowed. "And no more talk of going away. I refuse to
+allow. You shall not go."
+
+Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was
+interested. He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen
+is fifty Kronen, and South American beef is high of price. He followed
+Harmony into the outer room and bowed her out of his studio.
+
+"The Fraulein has paid?" he demanded, turning sharply to the lady
+secretary.
+
+"Always."
+
+"After the lesson?"
+
+"Ja, Herr Professor."
+
+"It is better," said the master, "that she pay hereafter before the
+lesson."
+
+"Ja, Herr Professor."
+
+Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's name.
+There were many such crosses on the ledger.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the
+morning, hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment
+it was over. He had lectures in the evenings, too, and although he
+lingered for an hour or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken
+possession of by the little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for
+things American.
+
+On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and
+helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little
+Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the
+stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.
+
+They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of
+the man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid
+tread. The two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals
+without speech between them were rather for lack of understanding than
+for that completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was
+the first to speak after their greeting.
+
+"Marie all right?"
+
+"Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week."
+
+"Thanks. Does it matter which night?"
+
+"Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'"
+
+"Say Friday, then."
+
+Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood
+failed to notice it.
+
+"Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?"
+
+"What was that?"
+
+Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.
+
+"Wake up, Byrne!" he said. "You remember well enough. Neither the Days
+nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you
+go on living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double
+drain there that tells on one--eating little and being eaten much. Those
+old walls are full of vermin. Why don't you take our apartment?"
+
+"Yours?"
+
+"Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and Breidau
+can't take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and we're going to
+Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead enough to take a holiday.
+And if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or
+less, you can have it, and--a home, old man."
+
+Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted
+him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.
+
+"Thanks," he said. "I think not."
+
+"Oh, all right." Stewart was rather offended. "I can't do more than give
+you a chance."
+
+They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of Sunday
+had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday and Tuesday.
+The sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and
+the smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in
+depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of
+musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses
+as they worked.
+
+Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his up-turned collar;
+moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather than
+precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a vision of the
+little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the table, and the
+general air of warmth and cheer, and a figure presiding over the brick
+stove in the kitchen. Byrne shook himself like a great dog and turned in
+at the gate of the hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
+
+That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned
+she faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that
+frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against
+barriers of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far
+from absolute cruelty.
+
+She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then, as
+the pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen--also in
+advance,--went on, recklessly. She played marvelously those days, crying
+out through her violin the despair she had sealed her lips against. On
+Thursday, playing for the master, she turned to find him flourishing
+his handkerchief, and went home in a sort of daze, incredulous that she
+could have moved him to tears.
+
+The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up the
+coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the chance of
+seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe
+Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle
+of native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the
+little Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was
+simmering in those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But
+instead he had kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray
+words, odd glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind
+her ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one
+of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in
+troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher
+on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that
+made even that grim official smile.
+
+Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically: so
+many hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many afternoons
+searching for something to do, making rounds of shops where her English
+might be valuable.
+
+And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one
+experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears in her
+eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first interview,
+under Peter's grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper was obviously
+suspicious of Peter. After that, whenever he could escape from clinics,
+Peter went along, but stayed outside, smoking his eternal cigarette, and
+keeping a watchful eye on things inside the shop.
+
+Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was not
+well, from the girl's eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper's face, he
+had opened the door in time to hear enough. He had lifted the proprietor
+bodily and flung him with a crash into a glass showcase of ornaments
+for the hair. Then, entirely cheerful and happy, and unmolested by the
+frightened clerks, he led Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic
+triumph bought her a bunch of valley lilies.
+
+Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very
+bad, indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own
+feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did
+a quixotic thing--which was Peter, of course, all over.
+
+He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea came to
+him there. Hardly came to him, being Marie's originally. The little flat
+was cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened her kitchen, brought in
+a waist she was making and sat sewing while the two men talked. Their
+conversation was technical, a new extirpation of the thyroid gland, a
+recent nephrectomy.
+
+In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She struggled
+with the technicalities of their talk as she sewed, finding here and
+there a comprehensive bit. At those times she sat, needle poised,
+intelligent eyes on the speakers, until she lost herself again in the
+mazes of their English.
+
+At ten o'clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her get the
+stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening beer. He took
+advantage of her absence to broach the matter of Harmony.
+
+"She's up against it, as a matter of fact," he finished. "It ought to be
+easy enough for her to find something, but it isn't."
+
+"I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she's rather
+handsome, isn't she?"
+
+"That's one of the difficulties. Yes."
+
+Stewart smoked and reflected. "No friends here at all?"
+
+"None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home."
+
+"Could she teach violin?"
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Aren't there any kids in the American colony who want lessons? There's
+usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any entertainments
+of the Doctors' Club."
+
+"They don't want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I could put
+a card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!" cried Peter with a burst of
+honest resentment, "why do I have to be poor?"
+
+"If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money, could
+you?"
+
+Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he found
+in his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was carefully filling
+the mugs. "Why do you not marry her?" she asked unexpectedly. "Then you
+could take this flat. We are going to Semmering for the winter sports. I
+would show her about the stove."
+
+"Marry her, of course!" said Peter gravely. "Just pick her up and carry
+her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to marry me need
+have nothing to do with it."
+
+"Ah, but does she not wish it?" demanded Marie. "Are you so certain,
+stupid big one? Do not women always love you?"
+
+Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back to the
+Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest, almost humble. It
+had never occurred to him that women might care for him for himself.
+In his struggling life there had been little time for women. But about
+himself as the solution of a problem--that was different.
+
+He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the girl's
+being willing, was Stewart right--could two people live as cheaply as
+one? Marie was an Austrian and knew how to manage--that was different.
+And another thing troubled him. He dreaded to disturb the delicate
+adjustment of their relationship; the terra incognita of a young
+girl's mind daunted him. There was another consideration which he put
+resolutely in the back of his mind--his career. He had seen many a
+promising one killed by early marriage, men driven to the hack work of
+the profession by the scourge of financial necessity. But that was a
+matter of the future; the necessity was immediate.
+
+The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered Schneeberg
+drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress defended by the
+elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized again. Peter Byrne
+battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he fought he made his
+decision.
+
+He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of
+the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and
+in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost
+ran up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the
+key and he swore under his breath. He slammed the door behind him. Peter
+always slammed doors, and had an apologetic way of opening the door
+again and closing it gently, as if to show that he could. Harmony's room
+was dark, but he had surprised her once into a confession that when
+she was very downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue
+indeed. So he stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from Dr.
+Gates's room across there came a hum of conversation. He knew at once
+that Harmony was there.
+
+Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand over his
+hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries to a proposal of
+marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the door.
+
+Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in
+deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and
+pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still under way.
+
+"Peter!" she cried. "Come in and get warm."
+
+Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round her
+shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.
+
+"Please go out!" she said. "I am not dressed."
+
+"You are covered," returned Anna Gates. "That's all that any sort of
+clothing can do. Don't mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed. Look out for
+pins!"
+
+Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed door
+and stared at Harmony--Harmony in the red light from the little
+open door of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit of white
+petticoat; Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and tied out of her
+eyes with an encircling band of rosy flannel.
+
+"Do sit!" cried Anna Gates. "You fill the room so. Bless you, Peter,
+what a collar!"
+
+No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve of
+proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter, seated
+now on the bed, writhed.
+
+"I rapped at Miss Wells's door," he said. "You were not there."
+
+This last, of course, to Harmony.
+
+Anna Gates sniffed.
+
+"Naturally!"
+
+"I had something to say to you. I--I dare say it is hardly pension
+etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say it there?"
+
+Harmony smiled above the flannel.
+
+"Could you call it through the door?"
+
+"Hardly."
+
+"Fiddlesticks!" said Dr. Gates, rising. "I'll go over, of course, but
+not for long. There's no fire."
+
+With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.
+
+"Please!" she implored. "I am not dressed and I'd rather not." She
+turned to Peter. "You can say it before her, can't you? She--I have told
+her all about things."
+
+Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that night.
+Then:--
+
+"It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment furnished--you
+could learn to use the stove, unless, of course, you don't like
+housekeeping--and food is really awfully cheap. Why, at these
+delicatessen places and bakeshops--"
+
+Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates's quizzical glance fixed
+on him, and Harmony's startled eyes.
+
+"What I am trying to say," he exploded, "is that I believe if you would
+marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow." He was talking
+for time now, against Harmony's incredulous face. "You'd be taking on
+others, of course. I'm not much and I'm as poor--well, you know. It--it
+was the apartment that gave me the idea--"
+
+"And the stove!" said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous laughter.
+After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It was real mirth
+with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that curious laughter of women
+that is not far from tears.
+
+Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and made a
+last feeble attempt to stick to his guns.
+
+"I mean it. You know I'm not in love with you or you with me, of course.
+But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might get along. Lord
+knows I need some one to look after me!"
+
+"And Emma?"
+
+"There is no Emma. I made her up."
+
+Harmony sobered at that.
+
+"It is only"--she gasped a little for breath--"it is only your--your
+transparency, Peter." It was the first time she had called him Peter.
+"You know how things are with me and you want to help me, and out of
+your generosity you are willing to take on another burden. Oh, Peter!"
+
+And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat the
+laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the cover of
+mirth.
+
+Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them both
+sternly through her glasses.
+
+"Once for all," she said brusquely, "let such foolishness end. Peter,
+I am ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you--not yet, not for a dozen
+years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not every man can be what
+you may be if you keep your senses and stay single. And the same is true
+for you, girl. To tide over a bad six months you would sacrifice the
+very thing you are both struggling for?"
+
+"I'm sure we don't intend to do it," replied Harmony meekly.
+
+"Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes, remember
+what I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal to the other.
+Now go away and let me alone. I'm not accustomed to proposals of
+marriage."
+
+It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself off
+to the bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was as
+comfortable as a washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also Harmony's
+problem was yet unsolved. Also she had called him Peter.
+
+Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of that?
+
+At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to
+warm the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked
+at his door.
+
+"Yes?" said Peter, still comfortably asleep.
+
+"It is Dr. Gates."
+
+"Sorry, Doctor--have to 'xcuse me," mumbled Peter from the blanket.
+
+"Peter!"
+
+Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Open the door just a crack."
+
+Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up
+to retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast from the open window
+blew round him, setting everything movable in the little room to
+quivering. He fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them,
+and yawning noisily went to the door.
+
+Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair was out
+of its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait
+down her back. She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered
+shortsightedly at Peter.
+
+"It's about Jimmy," she said. "I don't know what's got into me, but I've
+forgotten for three days. It's a good bit more than time for a letter."
+
+"Great Scott!"
+
+"Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a
+little. The nurse found him crying."
+
+"The poor little devil!" said Peter contritely. "Overdue, is it? I'll
+fix it to-night."
+
+"Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I'm off at
+seven."
+
+"The envelope?"
+
+"Here it is. And take my candle. I'm going to bed."
+
+That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from the
+twin clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across
+the city. It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a
+candle balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.
+
+He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had
+taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry,
+which weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter
+being strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine
+chamois. Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy's point of
+view and deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a
+harrowing incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a
+sort of glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off
+the chamois.
+
+The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to
+Jimmy Conroy--an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic,
+bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny
+village in the Austrian Tyrol.
+
+It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to
+sleep.
+
+It was just two o'clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her
+ward in the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his
+pillow, and taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended
+fury.
+
+"Now, thou bad one!" she said. "Awake, when the Herr Doktor orders
+sleep! Shall I use the slipper?"
+
+The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.
+
+"I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the
+mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes--"
+
+"The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter of a
+certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father has
+perhaps captured a great boar, or a--a chamois, and he writes of it."
+
+"Do chamois have horns?"
+
+"Ja. Great horns--so."
+
+"He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?"
+
+"None. Now sleep, or--the slipper."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+So far Harmony's small world in the old city had consisted of Scatchy
+and the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off in the
+firmament the master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone, weeping
+anxious postcards from every way station it is true, but nevertheless
+gone. Peter and Anna Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds
+held out. To them now she was about to add Jimmy.
+
+The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor's chaos of pink
+flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and complete
+even to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to be presented. It
+was with mingled emotions that Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to
+Harmony the next morning.
+
+"He hasn't been so well the last day or two," she said. "He doesn't
+sleep much--that's the worst of those heart conditions. Sometimes, while
+I've been working on this thing, I've wondered--Well, we're making a
+fight anyhow. And better take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and
+make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope--"
+
+Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital, meeting the
+doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy's little story quite
+well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.
+
+"Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear," she had finished.
+"You think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I think I
+have my own little tragedy, because I have to go through the rest of
+life alone, when taken in time I'd have been a good wife and mother.
+Still I have my work. But this little chap, brought over here by a
+father who hoped to see him cured, and spent all he had to bring him
+here, and then--died. It gets me by the throat."
+
+"And the boy does not know?" Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.
+
+"No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the mountains.
+When we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he was buried. It took
+about all the money there was. He wrote home about it, too, to the place
+they came from. There has never been any reply. Then ever since Peter
+has written these letters. Jimmy lives for them."
+
+Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that. Peter
+thought thus. A very large part of Harmony's life was Peter in those
+days.
+
+She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for
+Anna Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his
+letter that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of
+the night before. Of the proposal, most of all--it was so eminently
+characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its
+execution. Harmony's thought of Peter was very tender that morning
+as she stood in the arched gateway out of reach of the wind from the
+Schneeberg. The tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made
+her very beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for
+a bus, and stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm, recognized
+and admired her. After all, the American women were chic, she decided,
+although some of the doctors had wives of a dowdiness--Himmel! And she
+could copy the Fraulein's hat for two Kronen and a bit of ribbon she
+possessed.
+
+The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a Dozent
+with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into it, and the
+Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could not marry because
+the hospital board forbade it, made a speech for Jimmy in awe-inspiring
+German, ending up with a poem that was intended to be funny, but that
+made the nurses cry. From which it will be seen that Jimmy was a great
+favorite.
+
+During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a ceremony,
+Jimmy kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates's hand and waited. That
+the letter had come was enough. He lay back in anticipatory joy, and
+let himself be talked over, and bathrobed, and his hair parted Austrian
+fashion and turned up over a finger, which is very Austrian indeed.
+He liked Harmony. The girl caught his eyes on her more than once. He
+interrupted the speech once to ask her just what part of the robe she
+had made, and whether she had made the tassel. When she admitted the
+tassel, his admiration became mixed with respect.
+
+It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the barred
+window behind Jimmy's bed, and brought into dazzling radiance the pink
+bathrobe, and Harmony's eyes, and fat Nurse Elisabet's white apron. It
+lay on the bedspread in great squares, outlined by the shadows of the
+window bars. Now and then the sentry, pacing outside, would advance as
+far as Jimmy's window, and a warlike silhouette of military cap and
+the upper end of a carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events,
+however, were rare, the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and
+the odor of boiling onions from the lodge just inside.
+
+The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the nurses went
+about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a hairpin from her
+hair and made a great show of opening the many times opened envelope.
+
+"The letter at last!" she said. "Shall I read it or will you?"
+
+"You read it. It takes me so long. I'll read it all day, after you are
+gone. I always do."
+
+Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter's first halting
+lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold. They were mainly
+an apology for the delay. Then forgetting discomfort in the joy of
+creation, he became more comfortable. The account of the near-accident
+was wonderfully graphic; the description of the chamois was fervid, if
+not accurate. But consternation came with the end.
+
+The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The doctor
+read on.
+
+"For Heaven's sake," said Peter's frantic postscript, "find out how much
+a medium-sized chamois--"
+
+Dr. Gates stopped "--ought to weigh," was the rest of it, "and fix it
+right in the letter. The kid's too smart to be fooled and I never saw a
+chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns, haven't they?"
+
+"That's funny!" said Jimmy Conway.
+
+"That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake," remarked Dr. Gates,
+with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to Harmony.
+
+"How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?"
+
+"I think," observed Harmony, leaning forward, "that little boys must
+not ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is only six weeks
+off."
+
+"I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the boar's
+tusks."
+
+For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter of a
+boar, had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of tusks. The tusks
+had not been so difficult. But horns!
+
+Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more questions. The
+morning's excitement had tired him, and he lay back. Dr. Gates went to
+hold a whispered consultation with the nurse, and came back, looking
+grave.
+
+The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.
+
+The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony--to find some one
+worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire of women to do
+something, however small, for some one else. Her own troubles looked
+very small to her that day as she left the hospital and stepped out into
+the bright sunshine.
+
+She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to him.
+
+"Do you wish to do a very kind thing?" she asked in German.
+
+Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea, and
+nay, nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the sun was
+moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was near.
+
+"What do you wish?"
+
+"Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do not
+think--perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not, now and then,
+pass the window? It pleases him."
+
+"Pass the window! But why?"
+
+"In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and the
+gun."
+
+"Ah, the gun!" He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an
+officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he
+stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the
+girl knew he would do as she had desired.
+
+That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the professors
+at the hospital desired English conversation at two Kronen an hour.
+
+Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony was
+engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did much more
+than offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her self-confidence,
+although the immediate result was rather tragic.
+
+The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with
+Harmony, engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that
+afternoon. It was the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived five
+minutes late, panting, hat awry, and so full of the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister that she could think of nothing else.
+
+Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her fifty
+Kronen before the secretary as she went in. The master was out of humor.
+Should he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept waiting for a chit
+of a girl--only, of course, he said "das Kindchen" or some other German
+equivalent for chit--and then have her come into the sacred presence
+breathless, and salute him between gasps as the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister?
+
+Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also rather
+tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped
+her bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one's infant
+child from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage
+when with a lady.
+
+The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at Harmony.
+Then with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked to the outer
+room, and picking up the envelope with the fifty Kronen held it out to
+her without a word.
+
+Harmony's world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly at the
+envelope in her hand, at the master's retreating back.
+
+Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled
+together. Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady secretary
+touched her arm.
+
+"It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is sorry.
+You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will be well. You
+are his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat for grief that he
+has hurt you."
+
+The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary's voice was unmistakable.
+Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the two students who
+had laughed. They were not laughing now. Something of fellowship and
+understanding passed between them in the glance. After all, it was in
+the day's work--would come to one of them next, perhaps. And they had
+much in common--the struggle, their faith, the everlasting loneliness,
+the little white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.
+
+Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of days,
+Harmony went down the three long flights and out into the brightness of
+the winter day.
+
+On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward her,
+giving a definite impression of being bound for some particular
+destination and of being behind time. That this was not the case was
+shown by the celerity with which, when he saw Harmony, he turned about
+and walked with her.
+
+"I had an hour or two," he explained, "and I thought I'd walk. But
+walking is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk alone. How
+about the Frau Professor?"
+
+"She has taken me on. I'm very happy. But, Dr. Byrne--"
+
+"You called me Peter last night."
+
+"That was different. You had just proposed to me."
+
+"Oh, if that's all that's necessary--" He stopped in the center of the
+busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.
+
+"Please, Peter!"
+
+"Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?"
+
+"She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+"Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes."
+
+"Never owned anything taxable except a dog--and that wasn't a tax
+anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or
+surgery, where I'd be of some use?"
+
+"She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties."
+
+"Well, I've got something to say on that." He pulled from his overcoat
+pocket a largish bundle--Peter always bulged with packages--and held
+it out for her to see. "Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my
+compliments," he said, "that because some idiot at home sent me five
+pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here,
+I have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian
+customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty.
+I offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it."
+
+"Really, Peter?"
+
+"Really."
+
+Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars was
+fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She reached
+over and patted his arm.
+
+"You'll make it up in some way. Can't you cut off some little
+extravagance?"
+
+"I might cut down on my tailor bills." He looked down at himself
+whimsically. "Or on ties. I'm positively reckless about ties!"
+
+They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that
+eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a
+dog-trot. Peter looked at them critically.
+
+"Bosnians," he observed. "Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out
+of ten of them tubercular. It's a rotten game, this military play of
+Europe. How's Jimmy?"
+
+"We left him very happy with your letter."
+
+Peter flushed. "I expect it was pretty poor stuff," he apologized. "I've
+never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois--"
+
+"He says his father will surely send him the horns."
+
+Peter groaned.
+
+"Of course!" he said. "Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an eagle?
+One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the
+letter?"
+
+"He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands."
+
+Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he
+talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only
+there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club
+at home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his
+hobby.
+
+"Scum of the earth, most of them," he said, his plain face glowing.
+"Dirty little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco;
+and one of them pawned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing
+the game right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them!
+Used to line 'em up and make 'em spell, and the two best spellers were
+allowed to fight it out with gloves--my own method, and it worked.
+Spell! They'd spell their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee,
+how I hated to give them up!"
+
+This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before.
+For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always
+seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother
+attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof.
+Peter felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other
+things.
+
+A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension
+Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in
+ulster and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was
+coming down with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up
+the staircase like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed
+Peter and Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.
+
+"I've been waiting for you two," she flung at them. "I've had a terrific
+row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!"
+
+It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after
+everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung,
+at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the
+sharp little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly
+heart.
+
+"Sit down, child." Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. "You are fagged
+out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much
+did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?"
+
+It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.
+
+"I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it
+will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper,
+I'm sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria
+Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for us!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in
+the cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the conversational
+bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.
+
+Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of
+Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars--back, but with a difference.
+True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges, obedient to
+every whim of the December gales; but the casement windows in the salon
+no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of
+rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented
+extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a
+battered but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a
+table with an oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove
+gleamed warm with fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined
+medical books of Peter and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they
+used in common.
+
+Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria
+Theresa. But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the
+stove open, and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed,
+with Harmony playing softly, it took resolution on Peter's part to
+put on his overcoat and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a
+discussion of the function of the pituitary body.
+
+The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only
+greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal,
+which had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they
+bought in quantity and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp
+was a trifle. They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across
+boasted a deer from the mountains. They had other game occasionally,
+when Peter, carrying home a mysterious package, would make them guess
+what it might contain. Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits.
+She knew how to cook rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.
+
+For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing
+to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance
+of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the
+tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch
+him. Peter was firm.
+
+It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.
+
+"Don't be too obstinate, Peter," she admonished him. "The child needs
+occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the
+financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her
+heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund."
+
+And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur
+from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna
+almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make
+certain of her usefulness.
+
+A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier
+shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of
+the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the
+Austrians.
+
+The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least
+of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women,
+and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound
+or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was
+growing round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real
+change was in Harmony herself.
+
+The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which
+such changes come--not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath.
+One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion,
+quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional
+introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman,
+tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified
+on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and high
+spirits.
+
+The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had
+been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the
+Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be
+recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every
+odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had
+had a bad week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In
+vain the sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and
+nodded through it; in vain--when the street was deserted and there
+was none to notice--he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the
+pavement outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and
+ringing clang.
+
+In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing
+unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as
+never was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he
+carefully emphasized.
+
+And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the
+aid of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the
+barred window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had
+almost fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the
+manual of arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all
+most exciting.
+
+Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken
+him some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in
+jelly and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had
+been a great success.
+
+It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near
+his heart.
+
+"The horns haven't come, have they?" he asked wistfully.
+
+"No, not yet."
+
+"Do you think he got my letter about them?"
+
+"He answered it, didn't he?"
+
+Jimmy drew a long breath. "It's very funny. He's mostly so quick. If I
+had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the
+bed. And I could pretend I was hunting."
+
+Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw
+hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store
+a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head
+down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the
+shop door as if mutely begging admission.
+
+She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.
+Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The
+wild-game seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he
+would mount head and antlers for his wife's cousin in Galicia as a
+Christmas gift.
+
+Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was
+profoundly depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early
+and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile.
+Anna was not yet home.
+
+Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a
+movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.
+
+"Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always
+beautiful, but--you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony."
+
+"That is because you like me. We always think our friends are
+beautiful."
+
+"I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful."
+
+The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table,
+and Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast
+fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few
+street sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from
+the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying
+humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed
+halls, its dark and twisting staircases.
+
+Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with
+the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had
+been growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was
+very comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
+Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are
+written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger
+gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed
+gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship,
+and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does
+not thrive on hunger.
+
+Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the
+struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy
+life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken
+himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the
+luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck.
+So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And
+now!
+
+He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he
+was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands
+hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.
+
+The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features.
+Harmony, knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.
+
+"I think you are sad to-night, Peter."
+
+"Depressed a bit. That's all."
+
+"It isn't money again?"
+
+It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before
+Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a
+hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been
+very upsetting.
+
+"Not more than usual. Don't mind me. I'll probably end in a roaring bad
+temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!"
+
+Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested
+a hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.
+
+"I have hurt you in some way?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"Could--could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes."
+
+"You wouldn't understand."
+
+"You haven't quarreled with Anna?" Harmony asked, real concern in her
+voice.
+
+"No. Good Lord, Harmony, don't ask me what's wrong! I don't know
+myself."
+
+He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the
+wall. Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen
+was entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare
+floor and the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and
+the candle when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.
+
+"Dearest," he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him,
+was kissing her lips, her hair.
+
+Harmony's heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him.
+The gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved
+senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.
+
+After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go.
+Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had
+torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left
+her only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him
+breathing. He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that
+was left in him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms
+again and keep her there.
+
+That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.
+
+She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned
+and faced him.
+
+"That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter," she said quietly.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"There isn't any question about it."
+
+He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still
+obsessed him. "Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If
+there is a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and
+loneliness--"
+
+"It has not made me happy."
+
+Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual.
+Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He
+knew then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched
+arms.
+
+"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it."
+
+"I would rather not talk about it, please."
+
+The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and
+was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and,
+after his habit, shook himself.
+
+"Very well, we'll not talk of it. But, for Heaven's sake, Harmony, don't
+avoid me. I'm not a cad. I'll let you alone."
+
+There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of
+promise from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered
+the kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an
+already overfed stove.
+
+That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty
+city fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two
+hours later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers
+nothing, the Portier's wife awakened.
+
+The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the
+Portier's wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the
+Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen
+seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he
+ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic
+respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like
+evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.
+
+The Portier's wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing
+to the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping
+that day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty
+air. Words had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in
+unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up--the floor was cold
+and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer
+across the street, as it swung on its hook?
+
+The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron
+candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the
+Portier's pillow. No startled yell followed.
+
+Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier's wife forgot the cold floor and
+the wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.
+
+Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even
+stood open an inch or two.
+
+Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door
+and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned
+kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an
+hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice
+to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain
+swung in the wind.
+
+At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had
+changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert
+Society--What was that?
+
+From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
+
+She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now
+lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with
+suspicion.
+
+"Thou hast been out of thy bed!"
+
+"But no!"
+
+"An hour since the bed was empty."
+
+"Thou dreamest."
+
+"The chain is off the door."
+
+"Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the Americans
+above? Sleep and keep peace."
+
+He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier's wife crawled
+into her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson feather
+comfort. But her soul was shaken.
+
+The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones out to
+do his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might be told by the
+soles of the feet, which were always soiled.
+
+At dawn the Portier's wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her
+sleeping lord's feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite black, as
+of one who had tramped in garden mould.
+
+Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened the door
+from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set out a pitcher for
+the milk.
+
+On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across the
+street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was written the one
+word, "Still!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps by
+which the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great leaps but
+with a thousand small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves
+its mark, a footprint on a naked soul. We trace a life by its scars, as
+a tree by its rings.
+
+Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and this
+with every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine affection for
+the girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions
+that Harmony's veil had been woven. To Anna Gates, worn with a thousand
+sleepless nights, a thousand thankless days, withered before her time
+with the struggling routine of medical practice, sapped with endless
+calls for sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became
+physiological.
+
+Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was rent.
+
+To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious creed,
+a philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung strange
+bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities, personal
+liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law and the
+prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and her prophet.
+
+In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no mischief.
+Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even in the event of
+the opportunity it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength
+of her convictions. Men love theories, but seldom have the courage of
+them, and Anna Gates was largely masculine. Women, being literal, are
+apt to absorb dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When it is
+false doctrine they discover it too late.
+
+Harmony was now a woman.
+
+Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to
+harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony's eyes
+widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased
+her more than to pit her individualism against the girl's rigid and
+conventional morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable
+argument.
+
+On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took
+place--hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing.
+Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been
+practicing, and at the end she played a little winter song by some
+modern composer. It breathed all the purity of a white winter's day; it
+was as chaste as ice and as cold; and yet throughout was the thought of
+green things hiding beneath the snow and the hope of spring.
+
+Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather
+ashamed of her thought.
+
+"It seems that way to me," she finished apologetically. "It sounds
+rather silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes
+certain things."
+
+"And this gentleman who writes of winter?"
+
+"I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it,
+exactly as in books--the difference between a love story and--and--"
+
+"--a dictionary!"
+
+"You always laugh," Harmony complained
+
+"That's better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in
+this world I want to weep always."
+
+"I don't find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there
+are good ones."
+
+"Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose."
+
+"There are plenty of good men."
+
+"What do you call a good man?"
+
+Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:--
+
+"Honorable men."
+
+Anna smiled. "My dear child," she said, "you substitute the code of a
+gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?"
+
+Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.
+
+"Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!
+When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.
+To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman--and a fifth
+over--for every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples
+there is a derelict like myself, mateless."
+
+Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her
+resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless,
+brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the
+atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single women were always
+presumed to be thus by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those
+weaker sisters who had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly
+a derelict, frankly regretted her maiden condition and railed with
+bitterness against her enforced childlessness. The near approach of
+Christmas had for years found her morose and resentful. There are, here
+and there, such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives,
+their sole passion that of maternity.
+
+Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her
+resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and
+offered her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of
+the individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and
+though refusing to accept Anna's theories, found her faith in her own
+weakened. She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up
+out of her discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written
+high in its firmament.
+
+When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the
+girl's stricken face.
+
+"I'm a fool!" she said contritely. "If Peter had been here he'd have
+throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and
+theorists are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about
+us--we never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I've
+been talking."
+
+Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for
+Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony
+from New York. The Big Soprano was very glad to be back and spent two
+pages over her chances for concert work.
+
+"... I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had had the
+money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing 'Brunnhilde,' it would have
+helped a lot. I could have said I'd sung in opera in Europe and at least
+have had a hearing at the Met. But I didn't, and I'm back at the church
+again and glad to get my old salary. If it's at all possible, stay until
+the master has presented you in a concert. He's quite right, you haven't
+a chance unless he does. And now I'll quit grumbling.
+
+"Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely, flushed with
+excitement and having been up since dawn curling her hair. He was rather
+a disappointment--small and blond, with light blue eyes, and almost
+dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn't care how pale a man's eyes were if
+he looked at me the way Henry looked at her.
+
+"They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to be alone
+together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could swallow for the lump
+in my throat, by myself. I was homesick enough in old Wien, but I am
+just as homesick now that I am here, for we are really homesick only for
+people, not places. And no one really cared whether I came back or not."
+
+Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day before,
+but with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the situation was
+unpleasant and decide to leave? What if a reckless impulse, recklessly
+carried out, were to break up an arrangement that had made a green oasis
+of happiness and content for all of them in the desert of their common
+despair?
+
+If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to argue,
+to justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally. He almost
+groaned aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the wintry garden.
+
+He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his word.
+"I am not a beast. I'll let you alone," he had said. She had had a bad
+night, as nights go. She had gone through the painful introspection
+which, in a thoroughly good girl, always follows such an outburst as
+Peter's. Had she said or done anything to make him think--Surely she had
+not! Had she been wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.
+
+While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an unaccustomed
+silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron candlestick in
+hand, Harmony, having read the Litany through in the not particularly
+religious hope of getting to sleep, was dreaming placidly. It was Peter
+who tossed and turned almost all night. Truly there had been little
+sleep that night in the old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the kitchen
+while supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories forgotten and wearing
+a knitted shawl against drafts, was making a salad, and Harmony, all
+anxiety and flushed with heat, was broiling a steak.
+
+Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and prayer.
+
+"Peter," she called, "you may set the table. And try to lay the cloth
+straight."
+
+Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched
+business of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in mouth.
+
+"Suppose I refuse?" he questioned. "You--you haven't been very friendly
+with me to-day, Harry."
+
+"I?"
+
+"Don't quarrel, you children," cried Anna, beating eggs vigorously.
+"Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The Portier loves her."
+
+"I'm sure I said good-evening to you."
+
+"You usually say, 'Good-evening, Peter.'"
+
+"And I did not?"
+
+"You did not."
+
+"Then--Good-evening, Peter."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday's
+promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with forgiveness and
+restoration.
+
+"Sometimes," said Peter humbly, "when I am in very great favor, you say,
+'Good-evening, Peter, dear.'"
+
+"Good-evening, Peter, dear," said Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving
+smoothly. Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and through
+Marie's frugality and the extra month's wages at Christmas, which was
+Marie's annual perquisite, being temporarily in funds the sky seemed
+clear enough, and Walter Stewart started on his holiday with a
+comfortable sense of financial security.
+
+Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie's temporary
+exile in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of
+the little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with
+long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's
+kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She
+disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there
+was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment.
+Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church
+and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty
+years' accumulation, that "Frank" might catch up with his profession.
+
+She had explained it rather tremulously at home.
+
+"Father wants to go," she said. "You children are big enough now to be
+left. He's always wanted to do it, but we couldn't go while you were
+little."
+
+"But, mother!" expostulated the oldest girl. "When you are so afraid of
+the ocean! And a year!"
+
+"What is to be will be," she had replied. "If I'm going to be drowned
+I'll be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub. And I'll not
+let father go alone."
+
+Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the
+children gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so
+elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase
+anything abroad. She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest
+her eyes lead her into the temptation of the shops. In Vienna she wore
+her home-town outfit with determination, vaguely conscious that the
+women about her had more style, were different. She priced unsuitable
+garments wistfully, and went home to her trunks full of best materials
+that would never wear out. The children, knowing her, had bought the
+best.
+
+To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is hard to
+say by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory. It
+was as though his own status gained by it. He had much the same feeling
+about the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as
+if irregularity were thus regularized.
+
+Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn an
+experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn
+under her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very pretty, rather
+frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire
+evening.
+
+So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so
+conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart breaking the law and
+trying to keep the letter!
+
+On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There was
+much to do. The house must be left clean and shining. There must be no
+feminine gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely
+masculine establishment. At the last moment, so late that it sent her
+heart into her mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from
+Stewart's watchful eyes. She gave it to the milk girl.
+
+Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr
+Doktor's American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy,
+bound with iron. And with her own clothing she packed Stewart's, the
+dress-suit he had worn once to the Embassy, a hat that folded, strange
+American shoes, and books--always books. The Herr Doktor would study
+at Semmering. When all was in readiness and Stewart was taking a final
+survey, Marie ran downstairs and summoned a cab. It did not occur to her
+to ask him to do it. Marie's small life was one of service, and besides
+there was an element in their relationship that no one but Marie
+suspected, and that she hid even from herself. She was very much in
+love with this indifferent American, this captious temporary god of her
+domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred to Stewart; but
+Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had more than once
+caught a look in Marie's eyes as she turned them on the other man, and
+had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.
+
+When the train was well under way, however, and he found no disturbing
+element among the three others in the compartment, Stewart relaxed.
+Semmering was a favorite resort with the American colony, but not until
+later in the winter. In December there were rains in the mountains, and
+low-lying clouds that invested some of the chalets in constant fog.
+It was not until the middle of January that the little mountain train
+became crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and
+jaunty feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with Alpine
+cloaks and iron-pointed sticks.
+
+Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her life,
+and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very shadow of the
+Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.
+
+Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles or
+so away above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed the cog
+railroad, she had seen its white head turn rosy in the setting sun, and
+once when a German tourist from Munich had handed her his fieldglass she
+had even made out some of the crosses that showed where travelers had
+met their deaths. Now she would be very close. If the weather were good,
+she might even say a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of
+those who had died. It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when
+one has money and leisure.
+
+The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up the
+mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were moments when
+the track held to the cliffs only by gigantic fingers of steel, while
+far below were peaceful valleys and pink-and-blue houses and churches
+with gilded spires. There were vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed,
+and always there were tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a
+child in others; she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched
+him for comfort.
+
+"It is so dark," she apologized, "and it frightens me, the mountain
+heart. In your America, have you so great mountains?"
+
+Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood racing.
+
+"Much larger," he said magnificently. "I haven't seen a hill in Europe
+I'd exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the mountains there we
+use railway coaches. These toy railroads are a joke. At home we'd use
+'em as street-cars."
+
+"Really! I should like to see America."
+
+"So should I."
+
+The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America was
+apt to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him, which was
+even worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not repulsed, became
+silent.
+
+At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left the
+train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the platform
+beer and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train resumed its
+clanking progress they ate luncheon, drinking the beer from the bottles
+and slicing the sausage with a penknife. It was a joyous trip, a
+red-letter day in the girl's rather sordid if not uneventful life. The
+Herr Doktor was pleased with her. He liked her hat, and when she
+flushed with pleasure demanded proof that she was not rouged. Proof was
+forthcoming. She rubbed her cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and
+produced in triumph its unreddened purity.
+
+"Thou suspicious one!" she pouted. "I must take off the skin to assure
+thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none."
+
+"You're a good child." He stooped over and kissed one scarlet cheek and
+then being very comfortable and the beer having made him drowsy, he put
+his head in her lap and slept.
+
+When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered above
+and the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near. They were
+frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were long lines of
+granite avalanche sheds. The little passage of the car was full of
+tourists looking down.
+
+"We are very close, I am sure," an American girl was saying just outside
+the doorway. "See, isn't that the Kurhaus? There, it is lost again."
+
+The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had spoken
+was young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the first time and
+moved to a more decorous distance from Marie.
+
+Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her thoughts
+were busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also and the Herr
+Doktor would meet her. But that was foolish! There were other resorts
+besides Semmering, and in the little villa to which they went there
+would be no Americans. It was childish to worry about a girl whose back
+and profile only she had seen. Also profiles were deceptive; there was
+the matter of the ears. Marie's ears were small and set close to her
+head. If the American Fraulein's ears stuck out or her face were only
+short and wide! But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once
+swiftly into the compartment. She was quite lovely.
+
+Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of stretching and
+yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not speak to the girl;
+Marie noted that with some comfort. But shortly after she saw him
+conversing easily with a male member of the party. Her heart sank again.
+Life was moving very fast for Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the
+train.
+
+Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered his own
+cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels together, a German
+custom he had picked up. The girl was impressed; Marie saw that. When
+they drew into the station at Semmering Stewart helped the American
+party off first and then came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than
+the little Austrian's would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape
+attention, once they were out of the train and moving toward the gate
+of the station. He stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the
+hand-luggage and picked it up again, as though it weighed heavily,
+whereas it was both small and light. He loitered through the gate and
+paused to exchange a word with the gateman.
+
+The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh and well
+up the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated side by side in
+a straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a robe over their knees,
+and a noisy driver high above them on the driving-seat. Stewart spoke to
+her then, the first time for half an hour.
+
+Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered wide
+over the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens, hidden
+from the roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery separated by
+valleys. One might live in one part of Semmering for a month and never
+suspect the existence of other parts, or wander over steep roads and
+paths for days and never pass twice over the same one. The Herr Doktor
+might not see the American girl again--and if he did! Did he not see
+American girls wherever he went?
+
+The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing. Below
+in the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue shadows, of
+cows with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of houses with dark
+faces that opened an eye of lamplight as one looked.
+
+Across the valley and far above--Marie pointed without words. Her small
+heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it, steeper, more
+beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset hue of rose was the
+Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation as he gazed with her. He
+reached over and covered both her hands with his large one under the
+robe.
+
+The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of ecstasy,
+leaned back and watched the mountain; its crown faded from rose to gold,
+from gold to purple with a thread of black. There was a shadow on the
+side that looked like a cross. Marie stopped the sleigh at a wayside
+shrine, and getting out knelt to say a prayer for the travelers who had
+died on the Rax. They had taken a room at a small villa where board was
+cheap, and where the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier
+sort from Bavaria. Both the season and the modest character of the
+establishment promised them quiet and seclusion.
+
+To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury. It clung
+to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor, looked out from the
+back of the building over the valley, which fell away almost sheer from
+beneath their windows. A tiny balcony outside, with access to it by a
+door from the bedroom, looked far down on the tops of tall pines. It
+made Marie dizzy.
+
+She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be unpacked
+and the Herr Doktor's things put away, his shoes in rows, as he liked
+them, and his shaving materials laid out on the washstand. Then there
+was a new dress to put on, that she might do him credit at supper.
+
+Stewart's bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and the
+draft under the balcony door; the light was wrong for shaving. But the
+truth came out at last and found Marie not unprepared.
+
+"The fact is," he said, "I'm not going to eat with you to-night, dear.
+I'm going to the hotel."
+
+"With the Americans?"
+
+"Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother--with the young
+man you saw."
+
+Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to take
+off the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just fastened and
+fighting back tears as she struggled with it.
+
+"Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking."
+
+"I am not sulking."
+
+"Why should you change your clothes?"
+
+"Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish to
+wear it."
+
+Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had walked for
+five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel he found the party
+waiting for him, the women in evening gowns. The girl, whose name was
+Anita, was bewitching in pale green.
+
+That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind once
+more--a perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation, enlivened by a
+bit of sweet champagne, an hour or two on the terrace afterward with the
+women in furs, and stars making a jeweled crown for the Rax.
+
+He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and opening the
+door of the room found her missing.
+
+She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the balcony
+and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold, but she was wise
+with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.
+
+"Didst thou have a fine evening?"
+
+"Wonderful!"
+
+"I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested."
+
+"Good, little Marie!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+The card in the American Doctors' Club brought a response finally.
+It was just in time. Harmony's funds were low, and the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister had gone to St. Moritz for the winter. She regretted the
+English lessons, but there were always English at St. Moritz and it cost
+nothing to talk with them. Before she left she made Harmony a present.
+"For Christmas," she explained. It was a glass pin-tray, decorated
+beneath with labels from the Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a
+picture of the Emperor.
+
+The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east
+wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old
+garden gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it. It flew back
+violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in process of egress down
+the walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer, clad as usual in the best
+broadcloth and wearing her old sable cape, made over according to her
+oldest daughter's ideas into a staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the
+path now and Mrs. Boyer was gasping for breath.
+
+"I'm so sorry!" Harmony exclaimed. "It was stupid of me; but the
+wind--Is this your muff?"
+
+Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to
+extract a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down the
+broadcloth. Harmony stood apologetically by. It is explanatory of Mrs.
+Boyer's face, attitude, and costume that the girl addressed her in
+English.
+
+"I backed in," she explained. "So few people come, and no Americans."
+
+Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this humble
+apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at Harmony.
+
+"It really is no matter," she said, still coolly but with indications of
+thawing. "I am only glad it did not strike my nose. I dare say it would
+have, but I was looking up to see if it were going to snow." Here she
+saw the violin case and became almost affable.
+
+"There was a card in the Doctors' Club, and I called--" She hesitated.
+
+"I am Miss Wells. The card is mine."
+
+"One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin lessons
+and I offered to come. The mother is very busy."
+
+"I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can talk
+about it."
+
+Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the tea.
+She had had no good tea since she had left England, and was inclined to
+suspect all of it.
+
+They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead,
+explaining this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door, here
+an ancient bit of furniture not considered worthy of salvage, there
+a closed and locked room, home of ghosts and legends. To Harmony this
+elderly woman, climbing slowly behind her, was a bit of home. There
+had been many such in her life; women no longer young, friends of her
+mother's who were friends of hers; women to whom she had been wont to
+pay the courtesy of a potted hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas
+or a bit of custard during an illness. She had missed them all cruelly,
+as she had missed many things--her mother, her church, her small
+gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau Professor Bergmeister
+might allay her longing for these comfortable, middle-aged, placid-eyed
+friends of hers. But the Frau Professor Bergmeister had proved to be a
+frivolous and garrulous old woman, who substituted ease for comfort,
+and who burned a candle on the name-day of her first husband while her
+second was safely out of the house.
+
+So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way up the
+stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily
+engaged in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples Harmony
+had had about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to get them
+safely out of the place and to the hospital. So Peter was polishing the
+horns. Harmony had not expected to find him home, and paused, rather
+startled.
+
+"Oh, I didn't know you were home."
+
+Peter spoke without turning.
+
+"Try to bear up under it," he said. "I'm home and hungry, sweetheart!"
+
+"Peter, please!"
+
+Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in the salon
+and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But that keen-eyed
+lady had known him before he turned, had taken in the domesticity of the
+scene and Peter's part in it, and had drawn the swift conclusion of the
+pure of heart.
+
+"I'll come again," she said hurriedly. "I--I must really get home. Dr.
+Boyer will be there, and wondering--"
+
+"Mrs. Boyer!" Peter knew her.
+
+"Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn't it? How unexpected to find you here!"
+
+"I live here."
+
+"So I surmised."
+
+"Three of us," said Peter. "You know Anna Gates, don't you?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. Really I--"
+
+Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost damning.
+
+"She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken me in
+as a boarder. Please sit down."
+
+Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly puzzled
+at Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two single women
+and one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative strangers, setting up
+housekeeping together had never occurred to her. Many a single woman
+whom she knew at home took a gentleman into the house as a roomer, and
+thereafter referred to him as "he" and spent hours airing the curtains
+of smoke and even, as "he" became a member of the family, in sewing on
+his buttons. There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement;
+merely a concession to economic pressure.
+
+She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but bustling
+about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her cheeks flushed with
+excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau Professor had gone, the
+prospect of a music pupil meant everything. An American child, too!
+Fond as Harmony was of children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who
+walked the parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and
+fixed eyes through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted
+her. They were never alone, those Austrian children--always under
+surveillance, always restrained, always prepared to kiss the hand of
+whatever relative might be near and to take themselves of to anywhere so
+it were somewhere else.
+
+"I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American child," said
+Harmony, bringing in the tea.
+
+But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the American
+child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked
+most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult
+situation with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea
+was good; that was one thing.
+
+She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the concession
+of putting it on a chair as savoring too much of acceptance if not
+approval, and sipped her tea out of a spoon as becomes a tea-lover.
+Peter, who loathed tea, lounged about the room, clearly in the way, but
+fearful to leave Harmony alone with her. She was quite likely, at the
+first opportunity, to read her a lesson on the conventions, if nothing
+worse; to upset the delicate balance of the little household he was
+guarding. So he stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story,
+while Harmony toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the
+lessons. None came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and put
+down her cup.
+
+"That was very refreshing," she said. "Where shall I find the
+street-car? I walked out, but it is late."
+
+"I'll take you to the car." Peter picked up his old hat.
+
+"Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the
+conductors double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how can
+they when it is the wrong car?" She bowed to Harmony without shaking
+hands. "Thank you for the tea. It was really good. Where do you get it?"
+
+"There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel."
+
+"I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye."
+
+Not a word about the lessons or the American child!
+
+"You said something about my card in the Doctors' Club--"
+
+Something wistful in the girl's eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.
+
+After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand and her
+voice was not so hard.
+
+"That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social visit
+and we'll not spoil it with business."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I really think the boy's mother must attend to that herself. But I
+shall tell her where to find you, and"--here she glanced at Peter--"all
+about it."
+
+"Thank you," said Harmony gratefully.
+
+Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and through
+the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind them he turned
+and faced her:--
+
+"You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer."
+
+Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The result
+was a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She drew her ample
+proportions into a dignity that was almost majesty.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I--I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without
+foundation."
+
+"I am glad of that." There was no conviction in her voice.
+
+"Of course," went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony's sake, "I
+suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is not a young
+woman by any means, and she takes very good care of Miss Wells. There
+were reasons why this seemed the best thing to do. Miss Wells was alone
+and--"
+
+"There is a Dr. Gates?"
+
+"Of course. If you will come back and wait she'll be along very soon."
+
+Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced that
+there might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the situation was
+anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in that she had lost the
+anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a piece of her mind. She walked
+along beside him without speaking until they reached the street-car
+line. Then she turned.
+
+"You called her--you spoke to her very affectionately, young man," she
+accused him.
+
+Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some
+perversion of humor seized him.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Boyer," he said, "that was in jest purely. Besides, I did
+not know that you were there!"
+
+Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged American
+womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and settled its
+broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the cane seat. It was
+outraged American womanhood that flung open the door of Marie Jedlicka's
+flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka's sitting room confronted her
+husband as he read a month-old newspaper from home.
+
+"Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?" she demanded.
+
+Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned to
+meet domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good humor, or at
+the most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.
+
+"I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided."
+
+"Dr. Gates--Anna Gates?"
+
+"There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I don't know
+their names."
+
+"Where does Peter Byrne live?"
+
+"In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything to eat
+or do we sup of Peter Byrne?"
+
+Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom of Marie
+Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of the beds with the
+crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing about rooms. There was no
+change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie's tiny
+slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial
+house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it
+hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that
+soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that
+there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential
+qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not
+people? That when grandfather's wraith is seen in his old armchair it
+is the chair that produces it, while grandfather himself serenely haunts
+the shades of some vast wilderness of departed spirits?
+
+Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was
+exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where the most
+orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no attraction whatever in
+the thing they are asked to believe. Mrs. Boyer, who would have regarded
+it as heterodox to substitute any other instrument for the harp of her
+expectation, tied on her gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka's mirror,
+and thought of Harmony and of the girls at home.
+
+She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less shocked
+than she had expected.
+
+"It's not your affair or mine," he said. "It's Byrne's business."
+
+"Think of the girl!"
+
+"Even if you are right it's rather late, isn't it?"
+
+"You could tell him what you think of him."
+
+Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living with a
+representative male had never taught his wife the reserves among members
+of the sex masculine.
+
+"I might, but I don't intend to," he said. "And if you listen to me
+you'll keep the thing to yourself."
+
+"I'll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils," snapped
+Mrs. Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.
+
+We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand painful
+steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked soul. The soul
+was Harmony's; the foot--was it not encased at that moment in Mrs.
+Boyer's comfortable house shoes?
+
+Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on her car,
+went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat, and with the
+sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too indignant to be cold. He
+ran up the staircase, hearing on all sides the creaking and banging with
+which the old house resented a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria
+Theresa.
+
+Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her face
+hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when he entered.
+Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She quivered under it
+and he took it away.
+
+"Crying?"
+
+"A little," very smothered. "Just dis-disappointment. Don't mind me,
+Peter."
+
+"You mean about the pupil?"
+
+Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now more than
+ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had stained her cheek.
+She looked rather hectic, very lovely.
+
+"Why did she change so when she saw you?"
+
+Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might have
+said, safe things. Not one came to him.
+
+"She--she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry," he said gravely.
+
+"She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But Anna?"
+
+"She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters," he added
+hastily. "I'll make Anna go to her and explain. It's her infernal
+jumping to a conclusion that makes me crazy."
+
+"She will talk, Peter. I am frightened."
+
+"I'll take Anna to-night and we'll go to Boyer's. I'll make that woman
+get down on her knees to you. I'll--"
+
+"You'll make bad very much worse," said Harmony dejectedly. "When a
+thing has to be explained it does no good to explain it."
+
+The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As in the
+dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the compelling influence
+of her nearness. He wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life
+before, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bid defiance to
+evil tongues. He was afraid of himself. To gain a moment he put a chair
+between them and stood, strong hands gripping its back, looking down at
+her.
+
+"There is one thing we could do."
+
+"What, Peter?"
+
+"We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it--it might not be
+so bad for you."
+
+"But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course, but--not that
+way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry."
+
+"Not even if I wish it very much?"
+
+"No."
+
+"If you are thinking of my future--"
+
+"I'm thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you care
+a little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are lonely and I
+am the only person you see much, so you think you want to marry me. You
+don't really. You want to help me."
+
+Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny his
+altruism.
+
+And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer, compared
+with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the compelling motive
+after all, his need of her.
+
+"It would be a rotten match for you," he agreed. "I only thought,
+perhaps--You are right, of course; you ought not to marry."
+
+"And what about you?"
+
+"I ought not, of course."
+
+Harmony rose, smiling a little.
+
+"Then that's settled. And for goodness' sake, Peter, stop proposing to
+me every time things go wrong." Her voice changed, grew grave and older,
+much older than Peter's. "We must not marry, either of us, Peter. Anna
+is right. There might be an excuse if we were very much in love: but we
+are not. And loneliness is not a reason."
+
+"I am very lonely," said Peter wistfully.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning and
+approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere of mystery
+that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a good night and
+having taken the morning's medicine without argument, had been allowed
+up in a roller chair. It struck Peter with a pang that the boy looked
+more frail day by day, more transparent.
+
+"I have brought you," said Peter gravely, "the cod-liver oil."
+
+"I've had it!"
+
+"Then guess."
+
+"Dad's letter?"
+
+"You've just had one. Don't be a piggy."
+
+"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
+
+"Vegetable," said Peter shamelessly.
+
+"Soft or hard!"
+
+"Soft."
+
+This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be vegetable;
+they could hardly be soft.
+
+"A kitten?"
+
+"A kitten is not vegetable, James."
+
+"I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!" For by this time Harmony was his
+very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which consisted of Nurse
+Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna and Peter, and of course
+the sentry, who did not know that he belonged.
+
+"Gelatin, to be sure," replied Peter, and produced the horns.
+
+It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row of
+beds, its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if to add a
+touch of completeness the sentry outside, peering in, saw the wheeled
+chair with its occupant, and celebrated this advance along the road to
+recovery by placing on the window-ledge a wooden replica of himself,
+bayonet and all, carved from a bit of cigar box.
+
+"Everybody is very nice to me," said Jimmy contentedly. "When my father
+comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who are kind to
+me. There was a woman on the ship--What is bulging your pocket, Peter?"
+
+"My handkerchief."
+
+"That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief."
+
+Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood
+up before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward watched joyously,
+while from pocket after pocket of Peter's old gray suit came Jimmy's
+salvage--two nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout
+colonel of hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier
+waiting to go through the various salutations due his rank before
+assisting him. A gala day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the
+little mountain town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if
+one did not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands
+soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was
+much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her
+almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the chair into the smooth
+white bed.
+
+He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of the deer
+beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping
+guard. As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet
+beckoning to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the
+sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the room. Just outside, round a
+corner, was the Dozent's laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where
+he slept, where on a stand was the photograph of the lady he would marry
+when he had become a professor and required no one's consent.
+
+The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which
+kept the boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with Austrian
+intrigue had made him invaluable. He it was who had originated the idea
+of making Jimmy responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly
+Trager quarreling over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or
+brawling over his soup with another patient, was likely to be hailed in
+a thin soprano, and to stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in
+mixed English and German, restored the decorum of the ward. They were a
+quarrelsome lot, the convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling
+disputes and awarding decisions that he slept almost all night. This was
+as it should be.
+
+The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white coat,
+stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous. He held out
+a letter.
+
+"This has come for the child," he said in quite good English. He was
+obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans
+who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with
+which some day he would marry. He liked the English language; he liked
+Americans because they learned quickly. He held out an envelope with a
+black border and Peter took it.
+
+"From Paris!" he said. "Who in the world--I suppose I'd better open it."
+
+"So I thought. It appears a letter of--how you say it? Ah, yes,
+condolence."
+
+Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave it open
+to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent
+read it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of
+sugar. Peter's face was very sober.
+
+"So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?"
+
+"Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a
+baby--went on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her, which
+is a good thing. She seems to have been a bad lot."
+
+"She comes to take him away. That is impossible."
+
+"Of course it is impossible," said Peter savagely. "She's not going
+to see the child if I can help it. She left because--she's the boy's
+mother, but that's the best you can say of her. This letter--Well,
+you've read it."
+
+"She is as a stranger to him?"
+
+"Absolutely. She will come in mourning--look at that black border--and
+tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the type."
+
+The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched,
+as does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the gushing letter in
+his hand and thought fiercely.
+
+"She is on her way here," said the Dozent. "That is bad. Paris to Wien
+is two days and a night. She may hourly arrive."
+
+"We might send him away--to another hospital."
+
+The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Had I a home--" he said, and glanced through the door to the portrait
+on the stand. "It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for a
+time. In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a
+fit person the boy could be given to her. It is, of course, an affair of
+police."
+
+This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
+imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail. He read
+the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy's mother,
+and failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy slept. A burly
+convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general
+appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up
+the blanket round the small shoulders.
+
+"I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day," said the
+Dozent. "That gives us a few hours. She will go to the police, and
+to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time--"
+
+"In the mean time," Peter replied, "I'll try to think of something. If I
+thought she could be warned and would leave him here--"
+
+"She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with him
+through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to be there
+for carnival, and the boy will die."
+
+Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read it
+again in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from it. It spoke
+of the dead father coldly, and the father had been the boy's idol. No
+good woman could have been so heartless. It offered the boy a seat in
+one of the least reputable of the Paris theaters to hear his mother
+sing. And in the envelope, overlooked before, Peter found a cutting
+from a French newspaper, a picture of the music-hall type that made him
+groan. It was indorsed "Mamma."
+
+Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in order,
+working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel--all in order but
+Peter's room. That was to have a special cleaning later. Next, still
+with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours with her violin, standing
+very close to the stove to save fuel and keep her fingers warm. She
+played well that morning: even her own critical ears were satisfied,
+and the Portier, repairing a window lock in an empty room below, was
+entranced. He sat on the window sill in the biting cold and listened.
+Many music students had lived in the apartment with the great salon;
+there had been much music of one sort and another, but none like this.
+
+"She tears my heart from my bosom," muttered the Portier, sighing, and
+almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.
+
+After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter's room. She felt very tender
+toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer's visit had died
+away, but there remained a clear vision of Peter standing behind the
+chair and offering himself humbly in marriage, so that a bad situation
+might be made better. And as with a man tenderness expresses itself in
+the giving of gifts, so with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony
+cleaned Peter's room.
+
+It was really rather tidy. Peter's few belongings did not spread to any
+extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the rudiments of order.
+Harmony took the covers from washstand and dressing table and washed and
+ironed them. She cleaned Peter's worn brushes and brought a pincushion
+of her own for his one extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own
+steamer rug and folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove
+in the room; it had been Harmony's room once, and she knew to the full
+how cold it could be.
+
+Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for the
+inner. She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up, when Anna
+came home.
+
+Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came somberly
+back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was making fast that
+day.
+
+"Hello, Harry," she said. "I'm going to take a bite and hurry off. Don't
+bother, I'll attend to myself." She stuffed the letter in her belt and
+got a plate from a shelf. "How pretty you look with your head tied up!
+If stupid Peter saw you now he would fall in love with you."
+
+"Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!"
+
+Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt rather
+better after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off, was busy over
+the brick stove. There was nothing said for a moment. Then:--
+
+"I am out of patience with Peter," said Anna.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because he hasn't fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?"
+
+"Please, Anna!"
+
+"It's better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it's superhuman of
+Peter. I wonder--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think I'll not tell you what I wonder."
+
+And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna's frank speech, did not insist.
+
+As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna's thoughts
+wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt and back again
+to Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been suspicious of Peter.
+From her dozen years of advantage in age and experience she looked down
+on Peter's thirty years of youth, and thought she knew something that
+Peter himself did not suspect. Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his
+heart-searching for him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony
+and did not himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup,
+revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and grace, a
+thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility she and Peter had
+assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for her letter.
+
+"I've had rather bad news," she said at last.
+
+"From home?"
+
+"Yes. My father--did you know I have a father?"
+
+"You hadn't spoken of him."
+
+"I never do. As a father he hasn't amounted to much. But he's very ill,
+and--I 've a conscience."
+
+Harmony turned a startled face to her.
+
+"You are not going back to America?"
+
+"Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and do go
+I'll find some one to take my place. Don't worry."
+
+The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came in, and
+there was no time to discuss Peter's new complication with her. Harmony
+and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent. Anna's unfortunate
+comment about Peter had made her constrained. After the meal Peter, pipe
+in mouth, carried the dishes to the kitchen, and there it was that he
+gave her the letter. What Peter's slower mind had been a perceptible
+time in grasping Harmony comprehended at once--and not only the
+situation, but its solution.
+
+"Don't let her have him!" she said, putting down the letter. "Bring him
+here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!"
+
+And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so obvious
+was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and estrays, banded
+together against a common poverty, a common loneliness, should share
+without question whatever was theirs to divide. Peter and Anna gave
+cheerfully of their substance, Harmony of her labor, that a small boy
+should be saved a tragic knowledge until he was well enough to bear it,
+or until, if God so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.
+
+The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind.
+Thus it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials
+of the Votivkirche showed nine o'clock, he did not notice a cab that
+halted across the street from the hospital.
+
+Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of
+him, carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and
+insisting on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to
+say that he had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that
+it was a short stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was
+undoubtedly clothing going to the laundry.
+
+Perhaps--it is just possible--the sentry had his suspicions. It is
+undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with Peter's arm
+close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going
+through the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing
+toward the carriage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg
+sulked behind walls of mist. From the little balcony of the Pension
+Waldheim one looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there
+by islands that were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were
+evergreen trees. The roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the
+horses steamed and sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the
+barking of a dog loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be
+seen. Children cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
+
+During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain
+with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain
+clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the
+slip.
+
+Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close the
+heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the room was
+sticky and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined to the
+house, grew irritable.
+
+Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender
+tenure she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither speech nor
+thought. And the little Marie's love for Stewart, grown to be a part of
+her, was largely maternal. She held him by mothering him, by keeping him
+comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have
+brought him to her in chains.
+
+And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement; he
+resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her unusual
+leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire,
+and stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious
+thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.
+
+On the night of the second day the weather changed. Marie, awakening
+early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the door carefully
+behind her. A new world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering
+branches, of white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe was
+become a garment. And from behind the villa came the cheerful sound of
+sleigh-bells, of horses' feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily
+along frozen roads. Even the barking of the dog in the next yard had
+ceased rumbling and become sharp staccato.
+
+The balcony extended round the corner of the house. Marie, eagerly
+discovering her new world, peered about, and seeing no one near ventured
+so far. The road was in view, and a small girl on ski was struggling to
+prevent a collision between two plump feet. Even as Marie saw her the
+inevitable happened and she went headlong into a drift. A governess who
+had been kneeling before a shrine by the road hastily crossed herself
+and ran to the rescue.
+
+It was a marvelous morning, a day of days. The governess and the child
+went on out of vision. Marie stood still, looking at the shrine. A drift
+had piled about its foot, where the governess had placed a bunch of
+Alpine flowers. Down on her knees on the balcony went the little
+Marie, regardless of the snow, and prayed to the shrine of the Virgin
+below--for what? For forgiveness? For a better life? Not at all. She
+prayed that the heels of the American girl would keep her in out of the
+snow.
+
+The prayer of the wicked availeth nothing; even the godly at times must
+suffer disappointment. And when one prays of heels, who can know of
+the yearning back of the praying? Marie, rising and dusting her chilled
+knees, saw the party of Americans on the road, clad in stout boots
+and swinging along gayly. Marie shrugged her shoulders resignedly. She
+should have gone to the shrine itself; a balcony was not a holy
+place. But one thing she determined--the Americans went toward the
+Sonnwendstein. She would advise against the Sonnwendstein for that day.
+
+Marie's day of days had begun wrong after all. For Stewart rose with the
+Sonnwendstein in his mind, and no suggestion of Marie's that in another
+day a path would be broken had any effect on him. He was eager to be
+off, committed the extravagance of ordering an egg apiece for breakfast,
+and finally proclaimed that if Marie feared the climb he would go alone.
+
+Marie made many delays: she dressed slowly, and must run back to see
+if the balcony door was securely closed. At a little shop where they
+stopped to buy mountain sticks she must purchase postcards and send them
+at once. Stewart was fairly patient: air and exercise were having their
+effect.
+
+It was eleven o'clock when, having crossed the valley, they commenced to
+mount the slope of the Sonnwendstein. The climb was easy; the road wound
+back and forward on itself so that one ascended with hardly an effort.
+Stewart gave Marie a hand here and there, and even paused to let her
+sit on a boulder and rest. The snow was not heavy; he showed her the
+footprints of a party that had gone ahead, and to amuse her tried
+to count the number of people. When he found it was five he grew
+thoughtful. There were five in Anita's party. Thanks to Marie's delays
+they met the Americans coming down. The meeting was a short one: the
+party went on down, gayly talking. Marie and Stewart climbed silently.
+Marie's day was spoiled; Stewart had promised to dine at the hotel.
+
+Even the view at the tourist house did not restore Marie's fallen
+spirits. What were the Vienna plain and the Styrian Alps to her, with
+this impatient and frowning man beside her consulting his watch and
+computing the time until he might see the American again? What was
+prayer, if this were its answer?
+
+They descended rapidly, Stewart always in the lead and setting a pace
+that Marie struggled in vain to meet. To her tentative and breathless
+remarks he made brief answer, and only once in all that time did he
+volunteer a remark. They had reached the Hotel Erzherzog in the valley.
+The hotel was still closed, and Marie, panting, sat down on an edge of
+the terrace.
+
+"We have been very foolish," he said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Being seen together like that."
+
+"But why? Could you not walk with any woman?"
+
+"It's not that," said Stewart hastily. "I suppose once does not matter.
+But we can't be seen together all the time."
+
+Marie turned white. The time had gone by when an incident of the sort
+could have been met with scorn or with threats; things had changed
+for Marie Jedlicka since the day Peter had refused to introduce her to
+Harmony. Then it had been vanity; now it was life itself.
+
+"What you mean," she said with pale lips, "is that we must not be seen
+together at all. Must I--do you wish me to remain a prisoner while
+you--" she choked.
+
+"For Heaven's sake," he broke out brutally, "don't make a scene. There
+are men cutting ice over there. Of course you are not a prisoner. You
+may go where you like."
+
+Marie rose and picked up her muff.
+
+Marie's sordid little tragedy played itself out in Semmering. Stewart
+neglected her almost completely; he took fewer and fewer meals at the
+villa. In two weeks he spent one evening with the girl, and was so
+irritable that she went to bed crying. The little mountain resort was
+filling up; there were more and more Americans. Christmas was drawing
+near and a dozen or so American doctors came up, bringing their families
+for the holidays. It was difficult to enter a shop without encountering
+some of them. To add to the difficulty, the party at the hotel, finding
+it crowded there, decided to go into a pension and suggested moving to
+the Waldheim.
+
+Stewart himself was wretchedly uncomfortable. Marie's tragedy was his
+predicament. He disliked himself very cordially, loathing himself and
+his situation with the new-born humility of the lover. For Stewart was
+in love for the first time in his life. Marie knew it. She had not lived
+with him for months without knowing his every thought, every mood. She
+grew bitter and hard those days, sitting alone by the green stove in
+the Pension Waldheim, or leaning, elbows on the rail, looking from the
+balcony over the valley far below. Bitter and hard, that is, during his
+absences; he had but to enter the room and her rage died, to be
+replaced with yearning and little, shy, tentative advances that he only
+tolerated. Wild thoughts came to Marie, especially at night, when the
+stars made a crown over the Rax, and in the hotel an orchestra played,
+while people dined and laughed and loved.
+
+She grew obstinate, too. When in his desperation Stewart suggested that
+they go back to Vienna she openly scoffed.
+
+"Why?" she demanded. "That you may come back here to her, leaving me
+there?"
+
+"My dear girl," he flung back exasperated, "this affair was not a
+permanent one. You knew that at the start."
+
+"You have taken me away from my work. I have two months' vacation. It is
+but one month."
+
+"Go back and let me pay--"
+
+"No!"
+
+In pursuance of the plan to leave the hotel the American party came to
+see the Waldheim, and catastrophe almost ensued. Luckily Marie was on
+the balcony when the landlady flung open the door, and announced it as
+Stewart's apartment. But Stewart had a bad five minutes and took it out,
+manlike, on the girl.
+
+Stewart had another reason for not wishing to leave Semmering. Anita
+was beautiful, a bit of a coquette, too; as are most pretty women. And
+Stewart was not alone in his devotion. A member of the party, a New
+Yorker named Adam, was much in love with the girl and indifferent who
+knew it. Stewart detested him.
+
+In his despair Stewart wrote to Peter Byrne. It was characteristic of
+Peter that, however indifferent people might be in prosperity, they
+always turned to him in trouble. Stewart's letter concluded:--
+
+"I have made out a poor case for myself; but I'm in a hole, as you can
+see. I would like to chuck everything here and sail for home with these
+people who go in January. But, confound it, Byrne, what am I to do with
+Marie? And that brings me to what I 've been wanting to say all along,
+and haven't had the courage to. Marie likes you and you rather liked
+her, didn't you? You could talk her into reason if anybody could. Now
+that you know how things are, can't you come up over Sunday? It's asking
+a lot, and I know it; but things are pretty bad."
+
+Peter received the letter on the morning of the day before Christmas. He
+read it several times and, recalling the look he had seen more than once
+in Marie Jedlicka's eyes, he knew that things were very bad, indeed.
+
+But Peter was a man of family in those days, and Christmas is a family
+festival not to be lightly ignored. He wired to Stewart that he would
+come up as soon as possible after Christmas. Then, because of the look
+in Marie's eyes and because he feared for her a sad Christmas, full of
+heartaches and God knows what loneliness, he bought her a most hideous
+brooch, which he thought admirable in every way and highly ornamental
+and which he could not afford at all. This he mailed, with a cheery
+greeting, and feeling happier and much poorer made his way homeward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with the
+great chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with cranberry eyes
+for supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree gleaming with candles on
+the stand, and beside the stand, in a huge chair, Jimmy!
+
+It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had been
+shopping and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless, with the
+shops full of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly overburdened.
+There had been anxieties, too, such as the pig's head, which must be
+done a certain way, and Jimmy, who must be left with the Portier's wife
+as nurse while all of them went to the hospital. The house revolved
+around Jimmy now, Jimmy, who seemed the better for the moving, and whose
+mother as yet had failed to materialize.
+
+In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as the
+early twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry kept
+guard and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground men
+wandered about, smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving to
+keep warm, offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, with
+here and there an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home.
+The hospital was always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she
+found it harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be so
+much suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful, insupportable.
+Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital in festivity is very
+affecting. It smiles through its tears. And in every assemblage there
+are sharply defined lines of difference. There are those who are going
+home soon, God willing; there are those who will go home some time after
+long days and longer nights. And there are those who will never go home
+and who know it. And because of this the ones who are never going home
+are most festively clad, as if, by way of compensation, the nurses
+mean to give them all future Christmasses in one. They receive an
+extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,--and they are not the less
+grateful because they understand. And when everything is over they lay
+away in the bedside stand the gloves they will never wear, and divide
+the extra orange with a less fortunate one who is almost recovered.
+Their last Christmas is past.
+
+"How beautiful the tree was!" they say. Or, "Did you hear how the
+children sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think--of
+angels."
+
+Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,
+and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was to
+play. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon;
+no one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the
+nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.
+Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and
+wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
+imposing audience was the result.
+
+Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats
+rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the
+roof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other
+illumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the
+rows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white
+gowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with
+the red beard stepped out and began to read an address--all caught
+Harmony by the throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt
+rather than heard her soft sob.
+
+Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through
+Harmony's eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away,
+leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of
+humanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be
+counted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early days, when a heart
+was not a pump, but a thing that ached or thrilled or struggled, that
+loved or hated or yearned.
+
+The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning
+festivity into gloom. It played Handel's "Largo"; it threw its whole
+soul into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor
+place, that Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep
+vibration of the cello. Harmony fidgeted.
+
+"How terrible!" she whispered. "To turn their Christmas-Eve into
+mourning! Stop them!"
+
+"Stop a German orchestra?"
+
+"They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!"
+
+The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed
+recitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the
+patients. Then--Harmony.
+
+Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous,
+she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the
+candles burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a
+white coat asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to
+her accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at
+first timidly, then lustily.
+
+Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the applause.
+Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought Peter's, and
+finding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as
+softly the others sang.
+
+"Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,"--they sang, with upturned eyes.
+
+"Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht..."
+
+Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in
+which his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a
+Christmas-Eve in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a girl-woman,
+of a still and holy night, of a child.
+
+"Nur das traute, hoch heilige Paar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar Schlaf'
+in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh'," they sang.
+
+There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that night.
+
+Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room, which
+had been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with
+a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony
+brought her small puzzles and together they solved them.
+
+"Shall it be a steak to-night?" thus Harmony humbly. "Or chops?"
+
+"With tomato sauce?"
+
+"If Peter allows, yes."
+
+Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:--
+
+"Fish," he would decide. "Fish with egg dressing."
+
+They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.
+
+The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement,
+but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many and bitter were the
+battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the
+litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.
+
+The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully
+calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on
+which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as
+a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for
+Peter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those
+days. He resented anything that took him from them.
+
+There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was
+failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones
+be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's
+great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built
+his house on the sand, indeed.
+
+So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.
+Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote letters of marvelous
+adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured
+them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of
+his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. "Dad" was
+already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes
+he called Peter "Dad." At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an
+agony of tenderness.
+
+And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
+Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the
+privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All
+day he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for
+the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming
+only, and sternly forbidden to eat.
+
+A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, with
+a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a
+pair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage was
+on his knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake
+with pink icing. The Portier's gift was a stealthy one, while his wife
+was having coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of
+Christmas does strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was
+roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the
+Portier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that
+only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there was
+a picture of the Christ-Child within.
+
+Young McLean came to call that evening--came to call and remained to
+worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor had
+come. McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, was
+a comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments since
+the day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the hallmark of respectability on
+the household, to restore it to something it had lost or had never had.
+
+She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna put Jimmy
+to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was extinguishing
+the dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean was at the piano,
+thrumming softly. Peter, turning round suddenly, surprised an expression
+on the younger man's face that startled him.
+
+For that one night Harmony had laid aside her mourning, and wore white,
+soft white, tucked in at the neck, short-sleeved, trailing. Peter had
+never seen her in white before.
+
+It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were always
+alert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night he was
+unusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp and watched
+the two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or that, the girl
+bending over a string of her violin. Anna came in and sat down near him.
+
+"The boy is quite fascinated," she whispered. "Watch his eyes!"
+
+"He is a nice boy." This from Peter, as if he argued with himself.
+
+"As men go!" This was a challenge Peter was usually quick to accept.
+That night he only smiled. "It would be a good thing for her: his people
+are wealthy."
+
+Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem. Eminently
+it would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in his well-made
+evening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language of music, who was
+almost speechless over her playing, and who looked up at her with eyes
+in which admiration was not unmixed with adoration.
+
+Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the room and
+took to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each time as he passed
+the door he tried not to glance in; each time he paused involuntarily.
+Jealousy had her will of him that night, jealousy, when he had never
+acknowledged even to himself how much the girl was to him.
+
+Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but that
+night he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the doors. Peter
+came in and sat with him in the dark, going over now and then to cover
+him, or to give him a drink, or to pick up the cage of mice which Jimmy
+insisted on having beside him and which constantly slipped off on to the
+floor. After a time Peter lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on a
+cork floating in a saucer of lard oil, and set it on the bedside table.
+Then round it he arranged Jimmy's treasures, the deer antlers, the cage
+of mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat in
+the room, his dead pipe in his teeth, and thought of many things.
+
+It was very late when young McLean left. The two had played until they
+stopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to bed. From
+Jimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their voices.
+
+"You have been awfully good to me," McLean said as he finally rose to
+go. "I--I want you to know that I'll never forget this evening, never."
+
+"It has been splendid, hasn't it? Since little Scatchy left there has
+been no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for some one to
+talk music to."
+
+Lonely! Poor Peter!
+
+"Then you will let me come back?"
+
+"Will I, indeed! I--I'll be grateful."
+
+"How soon would be proper? I dare say to-morrow you'll be
+busy--Christmas and all that."
+
+"Do you mean you would like to come to-morrow?"
+
+"If old Peter wouldn't be fussed. He might think--"
+
+"Peter always wants every one to be happy. So if you really care--"
+
+"And I'll not bore you?"
+
+"Rather not!"
+
+"How--about what time?"
+
+"In the afternoon would be pleasant, I think. And then Jimmy can listen.
+He loves music."
+
+McLean, having found his fur-lined coat, got into it as slowly as
+possible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in all
+the dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even then he
+hesitated, lingered, loath to break up this little world of two.
+
+"You play wonderfully," he said.
+
+"So do you."
+
+"If only something comes of it! It's curious, isn't it, when you think
+of it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and both of us
+working our heads off for something that may never pan out."
+
+There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not until
+after young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was almost word for
+word what Peter had said to her in the coffee-house the night they met.
+She thought it very curious, the coincidence, and pondered it, being
+ignorant of the fact that it is always a matter for wonder when the
+man meets the woman, no matter where. Nothing is less curious, more
+inevitable, more amazing. "You and I," forsooth, said Peter!
+
+"You and I," cried young McLean!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Quite suddenly Peter's house, built on the sand, collapsed. The shock
+came on Christmas-Day, after young McLean, now frankly infatuated, had
+been driven home by Peter.
+
+Peter did it after his own fashion. Harmony, with unflagging enthusiasm,
+was looking tired. Suggestions to this effect rolled off McLean's back
+like rain off a roof. Finally Peter gathered up the fur-lined coat, the
+velours hat, gloves, and stick, and placed them on the piano in front of
+the younger man.
+
+"I'm sorry you must go," said Peter calmly, "but, as you say, Miss Wells
+is tired and there is supper to be eaten. Don't let me hurry you."
+
+The Portier was at the door as McLean, laughing and protesting, went
+out. He brought a cablegram for Anna. Peter took it to her door and
+waited uneasily while she read it.
+
+It was an urgent summons home; the old father was very low. He was
+calling for her, and a few days or week' would see the end. There were
+things that must be looked after. The need of her was imperative.
+With the death the old man's pension would cease and Anna was the
+bread-winner.
+
+Anna held the paper out to Peter and sat down. Her nervous strength
+seemed to have deserted her. All at once she was a stricken, elderly
+woman, with hope wiped out of her face and something nearer resentment
+than grief in its place.
+
+"It has come, Peter," she said dully. "I always knew it couldn't last.
+They've always hung about my neck, and now--"
+
+"Do you think you must go? Isn't there some way? If things are so bad
+you could hardly get there in time, and--you must think of yourself a
+little, Anna."
+
+"I am not thinking of anything else. Peter, I'm an uncommonly selfish
+woman, but I--"
+
+Quite without warning she burst out crying, unlovely, audible weeping
+that shook her narrow shoulders. Harmony heard the sound and joined
+them. After a look at Anna she sat down beside her and put a white
+arm over her shoulders. She did not try to speak. Anna's noisy grief
+subsided as suddenly as it came. She patted Harmony's hand in mute
+acknowledgment and dried her eyes.
+
+"I'm not grieving, child," she said; "I'm only realizing what a selfish
+old maid I am. I'm crying because I'm a disappointment to myself. Harry,
+I'm going back to America."
+
+And that, after hours of discussion, was where they ended. Anna must go
+at once. Peter must keep the apartment, having Jimmy to look after and
+to hide. What was a frightful dilemma to him and to Harmony Anna took
+rather lightly.
+
+"You'll find some one else to take my place," she said. "If I had a day
+I could find a dozen."
+
+"And in the interval?" Harmony asked, without looking at Peter.
+
+"The interval! Tut! Peter is your brother, to all intents and purposes.
+And if you are thinking of scandal-mongers, who will know?"
+
+Having determined to go, no arguments moved Anna, nor could either of
+the two think of anything to urge beyond a situation she refused to
+see, or rather a situation she refused to acknowledge. She was not as
+comfortable as she pretended. During all that long night, while snow
+sifted down into the ugly yard and made it beautiful, while Jimmy slept
+and the white mice played, while Harmony tossed and tried to sleep and
+Peter sat in his cold room and smoked his pipe, Anna packed her untidy
+belongings and added a name now and then to a list that was meant
+for Peter, a list of possible substitutes for herself in the little
+household.
+
+She left early the next morning, a grim little person who bent over the
+sleeping boy hungrily, and insisted on carrying her own bag down the
+stairs. Harmony did not go to the station, but stayed at home, pale and
+silent, hovering around against Jimmy's awakening and struggling against
+a feeling of panic. Not that she feared Peter or herself. But she
+was conventional; shielded girls are accustomed to lean for a certain
+support on the proprieties, as bridgeplayers depend on rules.
+
+Peter came back to breakfast, but ate little. Harmony did not even sit
+down, but drank her cup of coffee standing, looking down at the snow
+below. Jimmy still slept.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" said Peter.
+
+"I'm not hungry, thank you."
+
+"You can sit down without eating."
+
+Peter was nervous. To cover his uneasiness he was distinctly gruff. He
+pulled a chair out for her and she sat down. Now that they were face
+to face the tension was lessened. Peter laid Anna's list on the table
+between them and bent over it toward her.
+
+"You are hurting me very much, Harry," he said. "Do you know why?"
+
+"I? I am only sorry about Anna. I miss her. I--I was fond of her."
+
+"So was I. But that isn't it, Harry. It's something else."
+
+"I'm uncomfortable, Peter."
+
+"So am I. I'm sorry you don't trust me. For that's it."
+
+"Not at all. But, Peter, what will people say?"
+
+"A great deal, if they know. Who is to know? How many people know about
+us? A handful, at the most, McLean and Mrs. Boyer and one or two others.
+Of course I can go away until we get some one to take Anna's place, but
+you'd be here alone at night, and if the youngster had an attack--"
+
+"Oh, no, don't leave him!"
+
+"It's holiday time. There are no clinics until next week. If you'll put
+up with me--"
+
+"Put up with you, when it is your apartment I use, your food I eat!" She
+almost choked. "Peter, I must talk about money."
+
+"I'm coming to that. Don't you suppose you more than earn everything?
+Doesn't it humiliate me hourly to see you working here?"
+
+"Peter! Would you rob me of my last vestige of self-respect?"
+
+This being unanswerable, Peter fell back on his major premise.
+
+"If you'll put up with me for a day or so I'll take this list of Anna's
+and hunt up some body. Just describe the person you desire and I'll find
+her." He assumed a certainty he was far from feeling, but it reassured
+the girl. "A woman, of course?"
+
+"Of course. And not young."
+
+"'Not young,'" wrote Peter. "Fat?"
+
+Harmony recalled Mrs. Boyer's ample figure and shook her head.
+
+"Not too stout. And agreeable. That's most important."
+
+"'Agreeable,'" wrote Peter. "Although Anna was hardly agreeable, in the
+strict sense of the word, was she?"
+
+"She was interesting, and--and human."
+
+"'Human!'" wrote Peter. "Wanted, a woman, not young, not too stout,
+agreeable and human. Shall I advertise?"
+
+The strain was quite gone by that time. Harmony was smiling. Jimmy,
+waking, called for food, and the morning of the first day was under way.
+
+Peter was well content that morning, in spite of an undercurrent of
+uneasiness. Before this Anna had shared his proprietorship with him. Now
+the little household was his. His vicarious domesticity pleased him. He
+strutted about, taking a new view of his domain; he tightened a doorknob
+and fastened a noisy window. He inspected the coal-supply and grumbled
+over its quality. He filled the copper kettle on the stove, carried
+in the water for Jimmy's morning bath, cleaned the mouse cage. He even
+insisted on peeling the little German potatoes, until Harmony cried
+aloud at his wastefulness and took the knife from him.
+
+And afterward, while Harmony in the sickroom read aloud and Jimmy put
+the wooden sentry into the cage to keep order, he got out his books and
+tried to study. But he did little work. His book lay on his knee, his
+pipe died beside him. The strangeness of the situation came over him,
+sitting there, and left him rather frightened. He tried to see it
+from the viewpoint of an outsider, and found himself incredulous and
+doubting. McLean would resent the situation. Even the Portier was a
+person to reckon with. The skepticism of the American colony was a thing
+to fear and avoid.
+
+And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just manage
+alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his resources
+to cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had undertaken to
+shield a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he would and could.
+
+Brave thoughts were Peter's that snowy morning in the great salon of
+Maria Theresa, with the cat of the Portier purring before the fire;
+brave thoughts, cool reason, with Harmony practicing scales very softly
+while Jimmy slept, and with Anna speeding through a white world, to the
+accompaniment of bitter meditation.
+
+Peter had meant to go to Semmering that day, but even the urgency of
+Marie's need faded before his own situation. He wired Stewart that he
+would come as soon as he could, and immediately after lunch departed for
+the club, Anna's list in his pocket, Harmony's requirements in mind. He
+paused at Jimmy's door on his way out.
+
+"What shall it be to-day?" he inquired. "A postcard or a crayon?"
+
+"I wish I could have a dog."
+
+"We'll have a dog when you are better and can take him walking. Wait
+until spring, son."
+
+"Some more mice?"
+
+"You will have them--but not to-day."
+
+"What holiday comes next?"
+
+"New Year's Day. Suppose I bring you a New Year's card."
+
+"That's right," agreed Jimmy. "One I can send to Dad. Do you think he
+will come back this year?" wistfully.
+
+Peter dropped on his baggy knees beside the bed and drew the little
+wasted figure to him.
+
+"I think you'll surely see him this year, old man," he said huskily.
+
+Peter walked to the Doctors' Club. On the way he happened on little
+Georgiev, the Bulgarian, and they went on together. Peter managed to
+make out that Georgiev was studying English, and that he desired to know
+the state of health and the abode of the Fraulein Wells. Peter evaded
+the latter by the simple expedient of pretending not to understand. The
+little Bulgarian watched him earnestly, his smouldering eyes not without
+suspicion. There had been much talk in the Pension Schwarz about the
+departure together of the three Americans. The Jew from Galicia still
+raved over Harmony's beauty.
+
+Georgiev rather hoped, by staying by Peter, to be led toward his star.
+But Peter left him at the Doctors' Club, still amiable, but absolutely
+obtuse to the question nearest the little spy's heart.
+
+The club was almost deserted. The holidays had taken many of the members
+out of town. Other men were taking advantage of the vacation to see the
+city, or to make acquaintance again with families they had hardly seen
+during the busy weeks before Christmas. The room at the top of the
+stairs where the wives of the members were apt to meet for chocolate and
+to exchange the addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room
+he found McLean. Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary
+habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for a
+dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to enlist McLean's assistance in his
+difficulties. McLean knew a good many people. He was popular,
+goodlooking, and in a colony where, unlike London and Paris, the great
+majority were people of moderate means, he was conspicuously well
+off. But he was also much younger than Peter and intolerant with the
+insolence of youth. Peter was thinking hard as he took off his overcoat
+and ordered beer.
+
+The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as he
+saw many things. How far his love might carry him, Peter had no idea. It
+seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and studied him over
+his magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly the girl's position, and
+that when he learned it a crisis might be precipitated.
+
+One of three things might happen: He might bend all his energies to
+second Peter's effort to fill Anna's place, to find the right person; he
+might suggest taking Anna's place himself, and insist that his presence
+in the apartment would be as justifiable as Peter's; or he might do at
+once the thing Peter felt he would do eventually, cut the knot of
+the difficulty by asking Harmony to marry him. Peter, greeting him
+pleasantly, decided not to tell him anything, to keep him away if
+possible until the thing was straightened out, and to wait for an hour
+at the club in the hope that a solution might stroll in for chocolate
+and gossip.
+
+In any event explanation to McLean would have required justification.
+Peter disliked the idea. He could humble himself, if necessary, to a
+woman; he could admit his asininity in assuming the responsibility of
+Jimmy, for instance, and any woman worthy of the name, or worthy of
+living in the house with Harmony, would understand. But McLean was
+young, intolerant. He was more than that, though Peter, concealing from
+himself just what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival
+for what he had never claimed. But a rival the boy was. Peter, calmly
+reading a magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip of the
+fiercest jealousy. He turned pages automatically, to recall nothing of
+what he had read.
+
+McLean, sitting across from him, watched him surreptitiously. Big Peter,
+aggressively masculine, heavy of shoulder, direct of speech and eye, was
+to him the embodiment of all that a woman should desire in a man. He,
+too, was jealous, but humbly so. Unlike Peter he knew his situation, was
+young enough to glory in it. Shameless love is always young; with years
+comes discretion, perhaps loss of confidence. The Crusaders were youths,
+pursuing an idea to the ends of the earth and flaunting a lady's
+guerdon from spear or saddle-bow. The older men among them tucked the
+handkerchief or bit of a gauntleted glove under jerkin and armor near
+the heart, and flung to the air the guerdon of some light o' love.
+McLean would have shouted Harmony's name from the housetops. Peter did
+not acknowledge even to himself that he was in love with her.
+
+It occurred to McLean after a time that Peter being in the club, and
+Harmony being in all probability at home, it might be possible to see
+her alone for a few minutes. He had not intended to go back to the house
+in the Siebensternstrasse so soon after being peremptorily put out; he
+had come to the club with the intention of clinching his resolution with
+a game of cribbage. But fate was playing into his hands. There was no
+cribbage player round, and Peter himself sat across deeply immersed in a
+magazine. McLean rose, not stealthily, but without unnecessary noise.
+
+So far so good. Peter turned a page and went on reading. McLean
+sauntered to a window, hands in pockets. He even whistled a trifle,
+under his breath, to prove how very casual were his intentions. Still
+whistling, he moved toward the door. Peter turned another page, which
+was curiously soon to have read two columns of small type without
+illustrations.
+
+Once out in the hall McLean's movements gained aim and precision. He got
+his coat, hat and stick, flung the first over his arm and the second on
+his head, and--
+
+"Going out?" asked Peter calmly.
+
+"Yes, nothing to do here. I've read all the infernal old magazines until
+I'm sick of them." Indignant, too, from his tone.
+
+"Walking?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Mind if I go with you?"
+
+"Not at all."
+
+Peter, taking down his old overcoat from its hook, turned and caught the
+boy's eye. It was a swift exchange of glances, but illuminating--Peter's
+whimsical, but with a sort of grim determination; McLean's sheepish, but
+equally determined.
+
+"Rotten afternoon," said McLean as they started for the stairs. "Half
+rain, half snow. Streets are ankle-deep."
+
+"I'm not particularly keen about walking, but--I don't care for this
+tomb alone."
+
+Nothing was further from McLean's mind than a walk with Peter that
+afternoon. He hesitated halfway down the upper flight.
+
+"You don't care for cribbage, do you?"
+
+"Don't know anything about it. How about pinochle?"
+
+They had both stopped, equally determined, equally hesitating.
+
+"Pinochle it is," acquiesced McLean. "I was only going because there was
+nothing to do."
+
+Things went very well for Peter that afternoon--up to a certain point.
+He beat McLean unmercifully, playing with cold deliberation. McLean
+wearied, fidgeted, railed at his luck. Peter played on grimly.
+
+The club filled up toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women, wives of
+members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather attentive before
+he met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted bow he gave her. And,
+finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one of the women on Anna's list.
+
+Peter, laying down pairs and marking up score, went over Harmony's
+requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a woman, not young,
+not too stout, agreeable and human. She was a large, almost bovinely
+placid person, not at all reminiscent of Anna. She was neat where Anna
+had been disorderly, well dressed and breezy against Anna's dowdiness
+and sharpness. Peter, having totaled the score, rose and looked down at
+McLean.
+
+"You're a nice lad," he said, smiling. "Sometime I shall teach you the
+game."
+
+"How about a lesson to-night in Seven-Star Street?"
+
+"To-night? Why, I'm sorry. We have an engagement for to-night."
+
+The "we" was deliberate and cruel. McLean writhed. Also the statement
+was false, but the boy was spared that knowledge for the moment.
+
+Things went well. Dr. Jennings was badly off for quarters. She would
+make a change if she could better herself. Peter drew her off to a
+corner and stated his case. She listened attentively, albeit not without
+disapproval.
+
+She frankly discredited the altruism of Peter's motives when he told
+her about Harmony. But as the recital went on she found herself rather
+touched. The story of Jimmy appealed to her. She scolded and lauded
+Peter in one breath, and what was more to the point, she promised to
+visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse the next day.
+
+"So Anna Gates has gone home!" she reflected. "When?"
+
+"This morning."
+
+"Then the girl is there alone?"
+
+"Yes. She is very young and inexperienced, and the boy--it's
+myocarditis. She's afraid to be left with him."
+
+"Is she quite alone?"
+
+"Absolutely, and without funds, except enough for her lessons. Our
+arrangement was that she should keep the house going; that was her
+share."
+
+Dr. Jennings was impressed. It was impossible to talk to Peter and not
+believe him. Women trusted Peter always.
+
+"You've been very foolish, Dr. Byrne," she said as she rose; "but you've
+been disinterested enough to offset that and to put some of us to shame.
+To-morrow at three, if it suits you. You said the Siebensternstrasse?"
+
+Peter went home exultant.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Christmas-Day had had a softening effect on Mrs. Boyer. It had opened
+badly. It was the first Christmas she had spent away from her children,
+and there had been little of the holiday spirit in her attitude as she
+prepared the Christmas breakfast. After that, however, things happened.
+
+In the first place, under her plate she had found a frivolous chain and
+pendant which she had admired. And when her eyes filled up, as they did
+whenever she was emotionally moved, the doctor had come round the table
+and put both his arms about her.
+
+"Too young for you? Not a bit!" he said heartily. "You're better-looking
+then you ever were, Jennie; and if you weren't you're the only woman for
+me, anyhow. Don't you think I realize what this exile means to you and
+that you're doing it for me?"
+
+"I--I don't mind it."
+
+"Yes, you do. To-night we'll go out and make a night of it, shall we?
+Supper at the Grand, the theater, and then the Tabarin, eh?"
+
+She loosened herself from his arms.
+
+"What shall I wear? Those horrible things the children bought me--"
+
+"Throw 'em away."
+
+"They're not worn at all."
+
+"Throw them out. Get rid of the things the children got you. Go out
+to-morrow and buy something you like--not that I don't like you in
+anything or without--"
+
+"Frank!"
+
+"Be happy, that's the thing. It's the first Christmas without the
+family, and I miss them too. But we're together, dear. That's the big
+thing. Merry Christmas."
+
+An auspicious opening, that, to Christmas-Day. And they had carried
+out the program as outlined. Mrs. Boyer had enjoyed it, albeit a bit
+horrified at the Christmas gayety at the Tabarin.
+
+The next morning, however, she awakened with a keen reaction. Her head
+ached. She had a sense of taint over her. She was virtue rampant
+again, as on the day she had first visited the old lodge in the
+Siebensternstrasse.
+
+It is hardly astonishing that by association of ideas Harmony came
+into her mind again, a brand that might even yet be snatched from the
+burning. She had been a bit hasty before, she admitted to herself. There
+was a woman doctor named Gates, although her address at the club was
+given as Pension Schwarz. She determined to do her shopping early and
+then to visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard
+woman, for all her inflexible morality, and more than once she had
+had an uneasy memory of Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face
+the afternoon of her visit. She had been a watchful mother over a not
+particularly handsome family of daughters. This lovely young girl needed
+mothering and she had refused it. She would go back, and if she found
+she had been wrong and the girl was deserving and honest, she would see
+what could be done.
+
+The day was wretched. The snow had turned to rain. Mrs. Boyer, shopping,
+dragged wet skirts and damp feet from store to store. She found nothing
+that she cared for after all. The garments that looked chic in the
+windows or on manikins in the shops, were absurd on her. Her insistent
+bosom bulged, straight lines became curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets
+gaped, collars choked her or shocked her by their absence. In the mirror
+of Marie Jedlicka, clad in familiar garments that had accommodated
+themselves to the idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump,
+rather comely matron. Here before the plate glass of the modiste, under
+the glare of a hundred lights, side by side with a slim Austrian girl
+who looked like a willow wand, Mrs. Boyer was grotesque, ridiculous,
+monstrous. She shuddered. She almost wept.
+
+It was bad preparation for a visit to the Siebensternstrasse. Mrs.
+Boyer, finding her vanity gone, convinced that she was an absurdity
+physically, fell back for comfort on her soul. She had been a good wife
+and mother; she was chaste, righteous. God had been cruel to her in the
+flesh, but He had given her the spirit.
+
+"Madame wishes not the gown? It is beautiful--see the embroidery! And
+the neck may be filled with chiffon."
+
+"Young woman," she said grimly, "I see the embroidery; and the neck
+may be filled with chiffon, but not for me! And when you have had five
+children, you will not buy clothes like that either."
+
+All the kindliness was gone from the visit to the Siebensternstrasse;
+only the determination remained. Wounded to the heart of her
+self-esteem, her pride in tatters, she took her way to the old lodge and
+climbed the stairs.
+
+She found a condition of mild excitement. Jimmy had slept long after his
+bath. Harmony practiced, cut up a chicken for broth, aired blankets for
+the chair into which Peter on his return was to lift the boy.
+
+She was called to inspect the mouse-cage, which, according to Jimmy, had
+strawberries in it.
+
+"Far back," he explained. "There in the cotton, Harry."
+
+But it was not strawberries. Harmony opened the cage and very tenderly
+took out the cotton nest. Eight tiny pink baby mice, clean washed by the
+mother, lay curled in a heap.
+
+It was a stupendous moment. The joy of vicarious parentage was Jimmy's.
+He named them all immediately and demanded food for them. On Harmony's
+delicate explanation that this was unnecessary, life took on a new
+meaning for Jimmy. He watched the mother lest she slight one. His
+responsibility weighed on him. Also his inquiring mind was very busy.
+
+"But how did they get there?" he demanded.
+
+"God sent them, just as he sends babies of all sorts."
+
+"Did he send me?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"That's a good one on you, Harry. My father found me in a hollow tree."
+
+"But don't you think God had something to do with it?"
+
+Jimmy pondered this.
+
+"I suppose," he reflected, "God sent Daddy to find me so that I would be
+his little boy. You never happened to see any babies when you were out
+walking, did you, Harry?"
+
+"Not in stumps--but I probably wasn't looking."
+
+Jimmy eyed her with sympathy.
+
+"You may some day. Would you like to have one?"
+
+"Very much," said Harmony, and flushed delightfully.
+
+Jimmy was disposed to press the matter, to urge immediate maternity on
+her.
+
+"You could lay it here on the bed," he offered, "and I'd watch it. When
+they yell you let 'em suck your finger. I knew a woman once that had a
+baby and she did that. And it could watch Isabella." Isabella was the
+mother mouse. "And when I'm better I could take it walking."
+
+"That," said Harmony gravely, "is mighty fine of you, Jimmy boy. I--I'll
+think about it." She never denied Jimmy anything, so now she temporized.
+
+"I'll ask Peter."
+
+Harmony had a half-hysterical moment; then:
+
+"Wouldn't it be better," she asked, "to keep anything of that sort a
+secret? And to surprise Peter?"
+
+The boy loved a secret. He played with it in lieu of other occupation.
+His uncertain future was sown thick with secrets that would never flower
+into reality. Thus Peter had shamelessly promised him a visit to the
+circus when he was able to go, Harmony not to be told until the tickets
+were bought. Anna had similarly promised to send him from America a
+pitcher's glove and a baseball bat. To this list of futurities he now
+added Harmony's baby.
+
+Harmony brought in her violin and played softly to him, not to disturb
+the sleeping mice. She sang, too, a verse that the Big Soprano had been
+fond of and that Jimmy loved. Not much of a voice was Harmony's, but
+sweet and low and very true, as became her violinist's ear.
+
+  "Ah, well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+   Deeply buried from human eyes,"
+
+she sang, her clear eyes luminous.
+
+  "And in the hereafter, angels may
+   Roll the stone from its grave away!"
+
+Mrs. Boyer mounted the stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She had
+snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although that very
+morning she had detested the suit, her round of shopping had again
+endeared it to her. She told the Portier in English what she thought
+of him, and climbed ponderously, pausing at each landing to examine the
+damage.
+
+Harmony, having sung Jimmy to sleep, was in the throes of an experiment.
+She was trying to smoke.
+
+A very human young person was Harmony, apt to be exceedingly wretched
+if her hat were of last year's fashion, anxious to be inconspicuous by
+doing what every one else was doing, conventional as are the very young,
+fearful of being an exception.
+
+And nearly every one was smoking. Many of the young women whom she met
+at the master's house had yellowed fingers and smoked in the anteroom;
+the Big Soprano had smoked; Anna and Scatchy had smoked; in the
+coffee-houses milliners' apprentices produced little silver mouth-pieces
+to prevent soiling their pretty lips and smoked endlessly. Even Peter
+had admitted that it was not a vice, but only a comfortable bad habit.
+And Anna had left a handful of cigarettes.
+
+Harmony was not smoking; she was experimenting. Peter and Anna had
+smoked together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without reasoning
+it out, Harmony was experimenting toward the end of establishing her
+relations with Peter still further on friendly and comradely grounds.
+Two men might smoke together; a man and a woman might smoke together
+as friends. According to Harmony's ideas, a girl paring potatoes might
+inspire sentiment, but smoking a cigarette--never!
+
+She did not like it. She thought, standing before her little mirror,
+that she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her lips together,
+as she had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke in a thin line. She
+smoked very hard, so that she stood in the center of a gray nimbus. She
+hated it, but she persisted. Perhaps it grew on one; perhaps, also,
+if she walked about it would choke her less. She practiced holding the
+thing between her first and second fingers, and found that easier than
+smoking. Then she went to the salon where there was more air, and tried
+exhaling through her nose. It made her sneeze.
+
+On the sneeze came Mrs. Boyer's ring. Harmony thought very fast. It
+might be the bread or the milk, but again--She flung the cigarette into
+the stove, shut the door, and answered the bell.
+
+Mrs. Boyer's greeting was colder than she had intended. It put Harmony
+on the defensive at once, made her uncomfortable. Like all the innocent
+falsely accused she looked guiltier than the guiltiest. Under Mrs.
+Boyer's searching eyes the enormity of her situation overwhelmed her.
+And over all, through salon and passage, hung the damning odor of the
+cigarette. Harmony, leading the way in, was a sheep before her shearer.
+
+"I'm calling on all of you," said Mrs. Boyer, sniping. "I meant to bring
+Dr. Boyer's cards for every one, including Dr. Byrne."
+
+"I'm sorry. Dr. Byrne is out."
+
+"And Dr. Gates?"
+
+"She--she is away."
+
+Mrs. Boyer raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously changed the subject,
+requesting a needle and thread to draw the rent together. It had been in
+Harmony's mind to explain the situation, to show Jimmy to Mrs. Boyer,
+to throw herself on the older woman's sympathy, to ask advice. But
+the visitor's attitude made this difficult. To add to her discomfort,
+through the grating in the stove door was coming a thin thread of smoke.
+
+It was, after all, Mrs. Boyer who broached the subject again. She had
+had a cup of tea, and Harmony, sitting on a stool, had mended the rent
+so that it could hardly be seen. Mrs. Boyer, softened by the tea and by
+the proximity of Harmony's lovely head bent over her task, grew slightly
+more expansive.
+
+"I ought to tell you something, Miss Wells," she said. "You remember my
+other visit?"
+
+"Perfectly." Harmony bent still lower.
+
+"I did you an injustice at that time. I've been sorry ever since. I
+thought that there was no Dr. Gates. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to
+deny it. People do things in this wicked city that they wouldn't do at
+home. I confess I misjudged Peter Byrne. You can give him my apologies,
+since he won't see me."
+
+"But he isn't here or of course he'd see you."
+
+"Then," demanded Mrs. Boyer grimly, "if Peter Byrne is not here, who has
+been smoking cigarettes in this room? There is one still burning in that
+stove!"
+
+Harmony's hand was forced. She was white as she cut the brown-silk
+thread and rose to her feet.
+
+"I think," she said, "that I'd better go back a few weeks, Mrs. Boyer,
+and tell you a story, if you have time to listen."
+
+"If it is disagreeable--"
+
+"Not at all. It is about Peter Byrne and myself, and--some others. It
+is really about Peter. Mrs. Boyer, will you come very quietly across the
+hall?"
+
+Mrs. Boyer, expecting Heaven knows what, rose with celerity. Harmony
+led the way to Jimmy's door and opened it. He was still asleep, a wasted
+small figure on the narrow bed. Beside him the mice frolicked in their
+cage, the sentry kept guard over Peter's shameless letters from the
+Tyrol, the strawberry babies wriggled in their cotton.
+
+"We are not going to have him very long," said Harmony softly. "Peter is
+making him happy for a little while."
+
+Back in the salon of Maria Theresa she told the whole story. Mrs. Boyer
+found it very affecting. Harmony sat beside her on a stool and she kept
+her hand on the girl's shoulder. When the narrative reached Anna's
+going away, however, she took it away. From that point on she sat
+uncompromisingly rigid and listened.
+
+"Then you mean to say," she exploded when Harmony had finished, "that
+you intend to stay on here, just the two of you?"
+
+"And Jimmy."
+
+"Bah! What has the child to do with it?"
+
+"We will find some one to take Anna's place."
+
+"I doubt it. And until you do?"
+
+"There is nothing wicked in what we are doing. Don't you see, Mrs.
+Boyer, I can't leave the boy."
+
+"Since Peter is so altruistic, let him hire a nurse."
+
+Bad as things were, Harmony smiled.
+
+"A nurse!" she said. "Why, do you realize that he is keeping three
+people now on what is starvation for one?"
+
+"Then he's a fool!" Mrs. Boyer rose in majesty. "I'm not going to leave
+you here."
+
+"I'm sorry. You must see--"
+
+"I see nothing but a girl deliberately putting herself in a compromising
+portion and worse."
+
+"Mrs. Boyer!"
+
+"Get your things on. I guess Dr. Boyer and I can look after you until we
+can send you home."
+
+"I am not going home--yet," said poor Harmony, biting her lip to steady
+it.
+
+Back and forth waged the battle, Mrs. Boyer assailing, Harmony offering
+little defense but standing firm on her refusal to go as long as Peter
+would let her remain.
+
+"It means so much to me," she ventured, goaded. "And I earn my lodging
+and board. I work hard and--I make him comfortable. It costs him very
+little and I give him something in exchange. All men are not alike. If
+the sort you have known are--are different--"
+
+This was unfortunate. Mrs. Boyer stiffened. She ceased offensive
+tactics, and retired grimly into the dignity of her high calling of
+virtuous wife and mother. She washed her hands of Harmony and Peter. She
+tied on her veil with shaking hands, and prepared to leave Harmony to
+her fate.
+
+"Give me your mother's address," she demanded.
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"You absolutely refuse to save yourself?"
+
+"From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to save
+myself from, Mrs. Boyer--uncharitable people, and--and cruel people."
+
+Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
+
+"Meaning me!" she retorted. "My dear child, people are always cruel who
+try to save us from ourselves."
+
+Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna's specious arguments must pop into
+her head at that instant and demand expression.
+
+"People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old standards
+have gone. It is what one's conscience condemns that is wrong, isn't
+it? Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit the average, not the
+exception."
+
+Anna! Anna!
+
+Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
+
+"You are impossible!" she snapped. "After all, I believe it is Peter who
+needs protection! I shall speak to him."
+
+She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.
+
+"And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone. But if
+you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon YOU, keep your
+views to yourself."
+
+Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy's room and sank
+on her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the coverlet; she
+dared not touch it for fear of waking him--but she laid her cheek close
+to it for comfort. When Peter came in, much later, he found the boy wide
+awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.
+
+"I think she's been crying," Jimmy whispered. "She's been sobbing in her
+sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club. It was
+typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
+there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings.
+Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy
+of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and
+fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt.
+He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a
+magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and
+really in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and
+Harmony were not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and
+the reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in
+which he and Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter
+to scowl over his books at them, a future in which life was one long
+piano-violin duo, with the candles in the chandelier going out one by
+one, leaving them at last alone in scented darkness together--McLean
+heard nothing until the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
+
+After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating
+taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment
+that Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation
+was a little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with
+a stifled oath.
+
+Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
+
+"It is exactly as I tell you," she was saying. "If Peter Byrne is trying
+to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been
+there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the
+club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one
+thing remains, she is not there now."
+
+McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found
+a "comfortable" at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage.
+McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him.
+The cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of
+protests from its frantic passenger.
+
+The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence that
+afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He
+had thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew
+it now in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that
+maddened him: the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress
+in Peter's voice when he spoke to the girl, Peter's steady eyes in the
+semi-gloom of the salon while Harmony played.
+
+At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed,
+bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for
+half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the
+girl first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining--
+
+He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a madman. Peter
+was already there; his footprints were fresh in the slush of the path.
+The house door was closed but not locked. McLean ran up the stairs. It
+was barely twilight outside, but the staircase well was dark. At the
+upper landing he was compelled to fumble for the bell.
+
+Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the salon came
+a glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and furious, faced Peter.
+
+"I want to see Harmony," he said without preface.
+
+Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when the bell
+rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs. Boyer's visit. In
+the second between the peal of the bell and his opening the door he had
+decided what to do.
+
+"Come in."
+
+McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much shorter as
+slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his eyes.
+
+"Where is she?"
+
+"In the kitchen, I think. Come into the salon."
+
+McLean flung off his coat. Peter closed the door behind him and stood
+just inside. He had his pipe as usual. "I came to see her, not you,
+Byrne."
+
+"So I gather. I'll let you see her, of course, but don't you want to see
+me first?"
+
+"I want to take her away from here."
+
+"Why? Are you better able to care for her than I am?"
+
+McLean stood rigid. He had thrust his clenched hands into his pockets.
+
+"You're a scoundrel, Byrne," he said steadily. "Why didn't you tell me
+this this afternoon?"
+
+"Because I knew if I did you'd do just what you are doing."
+
+"Are you going to keep her here?"
+
+Peter changed color at the thrust, but he kept himself in hand.
+
+"I'm not keeping her here," he said patiently. "I'm doing the best I can
+under the circumstances."
+
+"Then your best is pretty bad."
+
+"Perhaps. If you would try to remember the circumstances, McLean,--that
+the girl has no place else to go, practically no money, and that I--"
+
+"I remember one circumstance, that you are living here alone with her
+and that you're crazy in love with her."
+
+"That has nothing to do with you. As long as I treat her--"
+
+"Bah!"
+
+"Will you be good enough to let me finish what I am trying to say? She's
+safe with me. When I say that I mean it. She will not go away from
+here with you or with any one else if I can prevent it. And if you care
+enough about her to try to keep her happy you'll not let her know you
+have been here. I've got a woman coming to take Anna's place. That ought
+to satisfy you."
+
+"Dr. Jennings?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She'll not come. Mrs. Boyer has been talking to her. Inside of an hour
+the whole club will have it--every American in Vienna will know about it
+in a day or so. I tell you, Byrne, you're doing an awful thing."
+
+Peter drew a long breath. He had had his bad half-hour before McLean
+came; had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony trying to smile,
+see her dragging about, languid and white, see her tragic attempts
+to greet him on the old familiar footing. Through it all he had been
+sustained by the thought that a day or two days would see the old
+footing reestablished, another woman in the house, life again worth the
+living and Harmony smiling up frankly into his eyes. Now this hope had
+departed.
+
+"You can't keep me from seeing her, you know," McLean persisted. "I've
+got to put this thing to her. She's got to choose."
+
+"What alternative have you to suggest?"
+
+"I'd marry her if she'd have me."
+
+After all Peter had expected that. And, if she cared for the boy
+wouldn't that be best for her? What had he to offer against that? He
+couldn't marry. He could only offer her shelter, against everything
+else. Even then he did not dislike McLean. He was a man, every slender
+inch of him, this boy musician. Peter's heart sank, but he put down his
+pipe and turned to the door.
+
+"I'll call her," he said. "But, since this concerns me very vitally, I
+should like to be here while you put the thing to her. After that if you
+like--"
+
+He called Harmony. She had given Jimmy his supper and was carrying out a
+tray that seemed hardly touched.
+
+"He won't eat to-night," she said miserably. "Peter, if he stops eating,
+what can we do? He is so weak!"
+
+Peter, took the tray from her gently.
+
+"Harry dear," he said, "I want you to come into the salon. Some one
+wishes to speak to you."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"Yes. Harry, do you remember that evening in the kitchen when--Do you
+recall what I promised?"
+
+"Yes, Peter."
+
+"You are sure you know what I mean?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's all right, then. McLean wants to see you."
+
+She hesitated, looking up at him.
+
+"McLean? You look so grave, Peter. What is it?"
+
+"He will tell you. Nothing alarming."
+
+Peter gave McLean a minute alone after all, while he carried the tray
+to the kitchen. He had no desire to play watchdog over the girl, he told
+himself savagely; only to keep himself straight with her and to save
+her from McLean's impetuosity. He even waited in the kitchen to fill and
+light his pipe.
+
+McLean had worked himself into a very fair passion. He was intense,
+almost theatrical, as he stood with folded arms waiting for Harmony. So
+entirely did the girl fill his existence that he forgot, or did not care
+to remember, how short a time he had known her. As Harmony she dominated
+his life and his thoughts; as Harmony he addressed her when, rather
+startled, she entered the salon and stood just inside the closed door.
+
+"Peter said you wanted to speak to me."
+
+McLean groaned. "Peter!" he said. "It is always Peter. Look here,
+Harmony, you cannot stay here."
+
+"It is only for a few hours. To-morrow some one is coming. And, anyhow,
+Peter is going to Semmering. We know it is unusual, but what can we do?"
+
+"Unusual! It's--it's damnable. It's the appearance of the thing, don't
+you see that?"
+
+"I think it is rather silly to talk of appearance when there is no one
+to care. And how can I leave? Jimmy needs me all the time--"
+
+"That's another idiocy of Peter's. What does he mean by putting you in
+this position?"
+
+"I am one of Peter's idiocies."
+
+Peter entered on that. He took in the situation with a glance, and
+Harmony turned to him; but if she had expected Peter to support her, she
+was disappointed. Whatever decision she was to make must be her own,
+in Peter's troubled mind. He crossed the room and stood at one of the
+windows, looking out, a passive participant in the scene.
+
+The day had been a trying one for Harmony. What she chose to consider
+Peter's defection was a fresh stab. She glanced from McLean, flushed and
+excited, to Peter's impassive back. Then she sat down, rather limp, and
+threw out her hands helplessly.
+
+"What am I to do?" she demanded. "Every one comes with cruel things to
+say, but no one tells me what to do."
+
+Peter turned away from the window.
+
+"You can leave here," ventured McLean. "That's the first thing. After
+that--"
+
+"Yes, and after that, what?"
+
+McLean glanced at Peter. Then he took a step toward the girl.
+
+"You could marry me, Harmony," he said unsteadily. "I hadn't expected
+to tell you so soon, or before a third person." He faltered before
+Harmony's eyes, full of bewilderment. "I'd be very happy if you--if you
+could see it that way. I care a great deal, you see."
+
+It seemed hours to Peter before she made any reply, and that her voice
+came from miles away.
+
+"Is it really as bad as that?" she asked. "Have I made such a mess of
+things that some one, either you or Peter, must marry me to straighten
+things out? I don't want to marry any one. Do I have to?"
+
+"Certainly you don't have to," said Peter. There was relief in his
+voice, relief and also something of exultation. "McLean, you mean well,
+but marriage isn't the solution. We were getting along all right until
+our friends stepped in. Let Mrs. Boyer howl all over the colony; there
+will be one sensible woman somewhere to come and be comfortable here
+with us. In the interval we'll manage, unless Harmony is afraid. In that
+case--"
+
+"Afraid of what?"
+
+The two men exchanged glances, McLean helpless, Peter triumphant.
+
+"I do not care what Mrs. Boyer says, at least not much. And I am not
+afraid of anything else at all."
+
+McLean picked up his overcoat.
+
+"At least," he appealed to Peter, "you'll come over to my place?"
+
+"No!" said Peter.
+
+McLean made a final appeal to Harmony.
+
+"If this gets out," he said, "you are going to regret it all your life."
+
+"I shall have nothing to regret," she retorted proudly.
+
+Had Peter not been there McLean would have made a better case, would
+have pleaded with her, would have made less of a situation that roused
+her resentment and more of his love for her. He was very hard hit, very
+young. He was almost hysterical with rage and helplessness; he wanted
+to slap her, to take her in his arms. He writhed under the restraint of
+Peter's steady eyes.
+
+He got to the door and turned, furious.
+
+"Then it's up to you," he flung at Peter. "You're old enough to know
+better; she isn't. And don't look so damned superior. You're human, like
+the rest of us. And if any harm comes to her--"
+
+Here unexpectedly Peter held out his hand, and after a sheepish moment
+McLean took it.
+
+"Good-night, old man," said Peter. "And--don't be an ass."
+
+As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean knew
+what in his heart he had known all along--that the girl was safe enough;
+that all that was to fear was the gossip of scandal-lovers. He took
+Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony stood before her very erect.
+
+"I suppose I've said too much; I always do," he said contritely. "But
+you know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?"
+
+"I am only sorry."
+
+He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic moment for
+him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door and down the dark
+stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax, after all that, to have Peter
+discover he had gone without his hat and toss it down to him a flight
+below.
+
+All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between Harmony and
+Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked during the meal of
+careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and Peter's proposed trip to
+Semmering, avoided each other's eyes, ate little or nothing. Once when
+Harmony passed Peter his coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between
+them they dropped the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns,
+Peter wretched and silent.
+
+Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from
+Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days. In two
+days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some one else. In two
+days some of the restraint would have worn off. Things would never be
+the same, but they would be forty-eight hours better.
+
+Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading aloud to
+him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a valise for the
+next day's journey and counted out into an envelope half of the money he
+had with him. This he labeled "Household Expenses" and set it up on
+his table, leaning against his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony
+about. The salon was dark except for the study lamp turned down.
+
+Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers
+and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the landing; Peter
+carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles on Jimmy's stand
+and wrote full directions for every emergency he could imagine. Then,
+finding it still only nine o'clock, he turned up the lamp in the salon
+and wrote an exciting letter from Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb,
+wandering on the mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and
+carried down into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because
+he stood so in loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable that
+before long Jimmy would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and, of course,
+because it had been a trying day all through, Peter's lips were none too
+steady as he folded up the letter.
+
+The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and closed
+the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to feel his way
+through the room. It touched a little sweater coat of Harmony's, hanging
+over the back of a chair. Peter picked it up in a very passion of
+tenderness and held it to him.
+
+"Little girl!" he choked. "My little girl! God help me!"
+
+He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to find
+that the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could rouse such a
+storm in him. It made him pause. He put down the coat and pulled himself
+up sharply. McLean was right; he was only human stuff, very poor human
+stuff. He put the little coat down hastily, only to lift it again gently
+to his lips.
+
+"Good-night, dear," he whispered. "Goodnight, Harmony."
+
+Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and
+supper that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor
+pension. They came to make inquiries.
+
+The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of
+the bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still lacked an
+occupant.
+
+Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly
+medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of
+language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life
+are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual
+disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised
+eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of
+Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter
+was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.
+
+"The women were also wicked," she said. "Of a man what does one expect?
+But of a woman! And the younger one looked--Herr Gott! She had the eyes
+of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of them
+left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The
+Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he
+so to me!"
+
+"She says," interpreted Dr. Jennings, "that they were a bad lot--that
+the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!"
+
+Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on
+the other woman's arm.
+
+"What an escape for you!" she said. "If you had gone there to live and
+then found the establishment--queer!"
+
+From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.
+Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.
+
+"American ladies!" said Olga. "Two, old and fat."
+
+"More hot water!" growled Katrina. "Why do not the Americans stay in
+their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the
+earth."
+
+Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.
+
+"Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne
+and the others!"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Of a certainty."
+
+"Then let me to the door!"
+
+"A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says--how she is
+wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she
+sent them all away. Here, take the door!"
+
+Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the
+dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having
+retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best
+forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a
+slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her
+head. "The Frau Schwarz is wrong," cried Olga passionately in Vienna
+dialect. "They were good, all of them!"
+
+"What in the world--"
+
+"And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr
+Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her."
+
+Dr. Jennings was puzzled.
+
+"She wishes to know where the girl lives," she interpreted to Mrs.
+Boyer. "A man wishes to know."
+
+"Naturally!" said Mrs. Boyer. "Well, don't tell her."
+
+Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to
+be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev,
+Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were
+inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a
+gesture.
+
+"She says," she interpreted as they walked on, "that Dr. Peter--by which
+I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a necktie, and that she'll be in
+hot water if she does not return it."
+
+Mrs. Boyer sniffed.
+
+"In love with him, probably, like the others!" she said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very early and
+without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying diagonally across
+his small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets. The communicating door
+into Harmony's room was open. Peter kept his eyes carefully from it,
+but his ears were less under control. He could hear her soft breathing.
+There were days coming when Peter would stand where he stood then and
+listen, and find only silence.
+
+He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully behind
+him and lighting a match to find his way down the staircase. The Portier
+was not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and to stand by while he donned
+the trousers which he deemed necessary to the dignity of his position
+before he opened the street door.
+
+Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter. The dawn
+grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The hurrying crowds
+at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his coffee, taken from a bare
+table in the station. The horizontal morning sunlight, shining in
+through marvelously clean windows, warmed the marble of the floor, made
+black shadows beside the heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into
+gold the hair of a toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The
+same morning light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of
+one of his shoes. Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at
+the bits of dust that floated in the sunshine.
+
+Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a passing
+thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it lasted Peter was a
+king. Everything was well. The world was his oyster. Life was his,
+to make it what he would--youth and hope and joy. Under the beatific
+influence he expanded, grew, almost shone. Youth and hope and joy--that
+cometh in the morning.
+
+The ecstasy passed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer shone;
+he still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and hugged it. He
+hunted out a beggar he had passed and gave him five Hellers. He helped a
+suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered bundle; he called the guard
+on the train "son" and forced a grin out of that dignitary.
+
+Peter traveled third-class, which was quite comfortable, and no bother
+about "Nicht Rauchen" signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness persisted as
+far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing ruggedness of the scenery
+and his first view of the Raxalpe, came recollection of the urgency of
+Stewart's last message, of Marie Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy
+that awaited him at the end of his journey.
+
+Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected. Love
+was a blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in
+his corner and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he
+recalled the look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when
+she looked at Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little
+thing. If only she'd had a chance!--Why wasn't he rich enough to help
+the ones who needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no
+one the wiser, and make her way.
+
+"Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!" Peter reflected. "Poor
+little guttersnipe!"
+
+The weather was beautiful. The sleet of the previous day in Vienna had
+been a deep snowfall on the mountains. The Schwarza was frozen, the
+castle of Liechtenstein was gray against a white world. A little
+pilgrimage church far below seemed snowed in against the faithful. The
+third-class compartment filled with noisy skiing parties. The old woman
+opened her oilcloth bundle, and taking a cat out of a box inside fed it
+a sausage.
+
+Up and up, past the Weinzettelwand and the Station Breitenstein, across
+the highest viaduct, the Kalte Rinne, and so at last to Semmering.
+
+The glow had died at last for Peter. He did not like his errand, was
+very vague, indeed, as to just what that errand might be. He was stiff
+and rather cold. Also he thought the cat might stifle in the oilcloth,
+but the old woman too clearly distrusted him to make it possible
+to interfere. Anyhow, he did not know the German for either cat or
+oilcloth.
+
+He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This made
+him vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know Stewart well
+enough to know whether he was punctilious in such matters or not: as a
+matter of fact he hardly knew him at all. It was because he had appealed
+to him that Peter was there, it being only necessary to Peter to be
+needed, and he was anywhere.
+
+The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his valise
+and started up--first long flights of steps through the pines, then a
+steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he met groups coming
+down, men that he thought probably American, pretty women in "tams" and
+sweaters. He watched for Marie, but there was no sign of her.
+
+He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he turned
+in at the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people following it,
+coming toward him. It was a singularly silent party. Peter, with his
+hand on the door-knocker, watched its approach with some curiosity.
+
+It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round it.
+Even then Peter did not understand. He did not understand until he
+saw Stewart, limp and unconscious, lifted out of the straw and carried
+toward him.
+
+Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery.
+And Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
+possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for Stewart,
+of publicity that would mean an end to the situation. But every inch of
+her soul was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down,
+and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree
+tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps
+even not yet dead--that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time
+and suffer!
+
+Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
+threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter, it had
+been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But there was
+this difference, whereas before he had drawn her back from the window
+and clapped her into sanity, now he let her alone. At the end of one of
+their quarrels she had flung out on to the balcony, and then had watched
+him through the opening in the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!
+
+Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over the
+mountain roads, seldom alone with Anita, but always near her. He left
+Marie sulking or sewing, as the case might be. He returned in the
+evening to find her still sulking, still sewing.
+
+But Marie did not sulk all day, or sew. She too was out, never far from
+Stewart, always watching. Many times she escaped discovery only by a
+miracle, as when she stooped behind an oxcart, pretending to tie her
+shoe, or once when they all met face to face, and although she lowered
+her veil Stewart must have known her instantly had he not been so intent
+on helping Anita over a slippery gutter.
+
+She planned a dozen forms of revenge and found them impossible of
+execution. Stewart himself was frightfully unhappy. For the first
+time in his life he was really in love, with all the humility of the
+condition. There were days when he would not touch Anita's hand, when
+he hardly spoke, when the girl herself would have been outraged at
+his conduct had she not now and then caught him watching her, seen the
+wretchedness in his eyes.
+
+The form of Marie's revenge was unpremeditated, after all. The light
+mountain snow was augmented by a storm; roads were ploughed through
+early in the morning, leaving great banks on either side. Sleigh-bells
+were everywhere. Coasting parties made the steep roads a menace to
+the pedestrian; every up-climbing sleigh carried behind it a string of
+sleds, going back to the starting-point.
+
+Below the hotel was the Serpentine Coast, a long and dangerous course,
+full of high-banked curves, of sudden descents, of long straightaway
+dashes through the woodland. Two miles, perhaps three, it wound its
+tortuous way down the mountain. Up by the highroad to the crest again,
+only a mile or less. Thus it happened that the track was always clear,
+except for speeding sleds. No coasters, dragging sleds back up the
+slide, interfered.
+
+The track was crowded. Every minute a sled set out, sped down the
+straightaway, dipped, turned, disappeared. A dozen would be lined up,
+waiting for the interval and the signal. And here, watching from the
+porch of the church, in the very shadow of the saints, Marie found her
+revenge.
+
+Stewart had given her a little wrist watch. Stewart and Anita
+were twelfth in line. By the watch, then, twelve minutes down the
+mountain-side, straight down through the trees to a curve that Marie
+knew well, a bad curve, only to be taken by running well up on the
+snowbank. Beyond the snowbank there was a drop, fifteen feet, perhaps
+more, into the yard of a Russian villa. Stewart and Anita were twelfth;
+a man in a green stocking-cap was eleventh. The hillside was steep.
+Marie negotiated it by running from tree to tree, catching herself,
+steadying for a second, then down again. Once she fell and rolled a
+little distance. There was no time to think; perhaps had she thought she
+would have weakened. She had no real courage, only desperation.
+
+As she reached the track the man in the green stocking-cap was in
+sight. A minute and a half she had then, not more. She looked about her
+hastily. A stone might serve her purpose, almost anything that would
+throw the sled out of its course. She saw a tree branch just above the
+track and dragged at it frantically. Some one was shouting at her from
+an upper window of the Russian villa. She did not hear. Stewart and
+Anita had made the curve above and were coming down at frantic speed.
+Marie stood, her back to the oncoming rush of the sled, swaying
+slightly. When she could hear the singing of the runners she stooped and
+slid the tree branch out against the track.
+
+She had acted almost by instinct, but with devilish skill. The sled
+swung to one side up the snowbank, and launched itself into the air.
+Marie heard the thud and the silence that followed it. Then she turned
+and scuttled like a hunted thing up the mountain side.
+
+Peter put in a bad day. Marie was not about, could not be located.
+Stewart, suffering from concussion, lay insensible all day and all of
+the night. Peter could find no fracture, but felt it wise to get another
+opinion. In the afternoon he sent for a doctor from the Kurhaus and
+learned for the first time that Anita had also been hurt--a broken arm.
+"Not serious," said the Kurhaus man. "She is brave, very brave, the
+young woman. I believe they are engaged?" Peter said he did not know and
+thought very hard. Where was Marie? Not gone surely. Here about him lay
+all her belongings, even her purse.
+
+Toward evening Stewart showed some improvement. He was not conscious,
+but he swallowed better and began to toss about. Peter, who had had a
+long day and very little sleep the night before, began to look jaded. He
+would have sent for a nurse from the Kurhaus, but he doubted Stewart's
+ability to stand any extra financial strain, and Peter could not help
+any.
+
+The time for supper passed, and no Marie.
+
+The landlady sent up a tray to Peter, stewed meat and potatoes, a
+salad, coffee. Peter sat in a corner with his back to Stewart and ate
+ravenously. He had had nothing since the morning's coffee. After that he
+sat down again by the bed to watch. There was little to do but watch.
+
+The meal had made him drowsy. He thought of his pipe. Perhaps if he got
+some fresh air and a smoke! He remembered the balcony.
+
+It was there on the balcony that he found Marie, a cowering thing that
+pushed his hands away when he would have caught her and broke into
+passionate crying.
+
+"I cannot! I cannot!"
+
+"Cannot what?" demanded Peter gently, watching her. So near was the
+balcony rail!
+
+"Throw myself over. I've tried, Peter. I cannot!"
+
+"I should think not!" said Peter sternly. "Just now when we need you,
+too! Come in and don't be a foolish child."
+
+But Marie would not go in. She held back, clinging tight to Peter's big
+hand, moaning out in the dialect of the people that always confused him
+her story of the day, of what she had done, of watching Stewart brought
+back, of stealing into the house and through an adjacent room to the
+balcony, of her desperation and her cowardice.
+
+She was numb with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, quite childish,
+helpless. Peter stood out on the balcony with his arm round her, while
+the night wind beat about them, and pondered what was best to do. He
+thought she might come in and care for Stewart, at least, until he was
+conscious. He could get her some supper.
+
+"How can I?" she asked. "I was seen. They are searching for me now. Oh,
+Peter! Peter!"
+
+"Who is searching for you? Who saw you?"
+
+"The people in the Russian villa."
+
+"Did they see your face?"
+
+"I wore a veil. I think not."
+
+"Then come in and change your clothes. There is a train down at
+midnight. You can take it."
+
+"I have no money."
+
+This raised a delicate question. Marie absolutely refused to take
+Stewart's money. She had almost none of her own. And there were other
+complications--where was she to go? The family of the injured girl did
+not suspect her since they did not know of her existence. She might get
+away without trouble. But after that, what?
+
+Peter pondered this on the balcony, while Marie in the bedroom was
+changing her clothing, soaked with a day in the snow. He came to the
+inevitable decision, the decision he knew at the beginning that he was
+going to make.
+
+"If I could only put it up to Harmony first!" he reflected. "But she
+will understand when I tell her. She always understands."
+
+Standing there on the little balcony, with tragedy the thickness of
+a pine board beyond him, Peter experienced a bit of the glow of the
+morning, as of one who stumbling along in a dark place puts a hand on a
+friend.
+
+He went into the room. Stewart was lying very still and breathing
+easily. On her knees beside the bed knelt Marie. At Peter's step she
+rose and faced him.
+
+"I am leaving him, Peter, for always."
+
+"Good!" said Peter heartily. "Better for you and better for him."
+
+Marie drew a long breath. "The night train," she said listlessly, "is an
+express. I had forgotten. It is double fare."
+
+"What of that, little sister?" said Peter. "What is a double fare when
+it means life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And there will be
+happiness, little sister."
+
+He put his hand in his pocket.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The Portier was almost happy that morning. For one thing, he had won
+honorable mention at the Schubert Society the night before; for another,
+that night the Engel was to sing Mignon, and the Portier had spent his
+Christmas tips for a ticket. All day long he had been poring over the
+score.
+
+"'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen?'" he sang with feeling
+while he polished the floors. He polished them with his feet, wearing
+felt boots for the purpose, and executing in the doing a sort of
+ungainly dance--a sprinkle of wax, right foot forward and back, left
+foot forward and back, both feet forward and back in a sort of double
+shuffle; more wax, more vigorous polishing, more singing, with longer
+pauses for breath. "'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees
+bloom?'" he bellowed--sprinkle of wax, right foot, left foot, any foot
+at all. Now and then he took the score from his pocket and pored over
+it, humming the air, raising his eyebrows over the high notes, dropping
+his chin to the low ones. It was a wonderful morning. Between greetings
+to neighbors he sang--a bit of talk, a bit of song.
+
+"'Kennst du das Land'--Good-morning, sir--the old Rax wears a crown. It
+will snow soon. 'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen'--Ah, madam the milk
+Frau, and are the cows frozen up to-day like the pump? No? Marvelous!
+Dost thou know that to-night is Mignon at the Opera, and that the Engel
+sings? 'Kennst du das Land'--"
+
+At eleven came Rosa with her husband, the soldier from Salzburg with one
+lung. He was having a holiday from his sentry duty at the hospital,
+and the one lung seemed to be a libel, for while the women had coffee
+together and a bit of mackerel he sang a very fair bass to the Portier's
+tenor. Together they pored over the score, and even on their way to the
+beer hall hummed together such bits as they recalled.
+
+On one point they differed. The score was old and soiled with much
+thumbing. At one point, destroyed long since, the sentry sang A sharp:
+the Portier insisted on A natural. They argued together over three
+Steins of beer; the waiter, referred to, decided for A flat. It was a
+serious matter to have one's teeth set, as one may say, for a natural
+and then to be shocked with an unexpected half-tone up or down! It
+destroyed the illusion; it disappointed; it hurt.
+
+The sentry stuck to the sharp--it was sung so at the Salzburg opera.
+The Portier snapped his thumb at the Salzburg opera. Things were looking
+serious; they walked back to the locale in silence. The sentry coughed.
+Possibly there was something, after all, in the one-lung rumor.
+
+It was then that the Portier remembered Harmony. She would know; perhaps
+she had the score.
+
+Harmony was having a bad morning. She had slept little until dawn, and
+Peter's stealthy closing of the outer door had wakened her by its very
+caution. After that there had been no more sleep. She had sat up in bed
+with her chin in her hands and thought.
+
+In the pitiless dawn, with no Peter to restore her to cheerfulness,
+things looked black, indeed. To what had she fallen, that first one man
+and then another must propose marriage to her to save her. To save her
+from what? From what people thought, or--each from the other?
+
+Were men so evil that they never trusted each other? McLean had frankly
+distrusted Peter, had said so. Or could it be that there was something
+about her, something light and frivolous? She had been frivolous. She
+always laughed at Peter's foolishnesses. Perhaps that was it. That
+was it. They were afraid for her. She had thrown herself on Peter's
+hands--almost into his arms. She had made this situation.
+
+She must get away, of course. If only she had some one to care for Jimmy
+until Peter returned! But there was no one. The Portier's wife was fond
+of Jimmy, but not skillful. And suppose he were to wake in the night and
+call for her and she would not come. She cried a little over this. After
+a time she pattered across the room in her bare feet and got from a
+bureau drawer the money she had left. There was not half enough to take
+her home. She could write; the little mother might get some for her, but
+at infinite cost, infinite humiliation. That would have to be a final,
+desperate resort.
+
+She felt a little more cheerful when she had had a cup of coffee. Jimmy
+wakened about that time, and she went through the details of his morning
+toilet with all the brightness she could assume--bath blankets, warm
+bath, toenails, finger-nails, fresh nightgown, fresh sheets, and--final
+touch of all--a real barber's part straight from crown to brow. After
+that ten minutes under extra comforters while the room aired.
+
+She hung over the boy that morning in an agony of tenderness--he was so
+little, so frail, and she must leave him. Only one thing sustained her.
+The boy loved her, but it was Peter he idolized. When he had Peter he
+needed nothing else. In some curious process of his childish mind Peter
+and Daddy mingled in inextricable confusion. More than once he had
+recalled events in the roving life he and his father had led.
+
+"You remember that, don't you?" he would say.
+
+"Certainly I remember," Peter would reply heartily.
+
+"That evening on the steamer when I ate so many raisins."
+
+"Of course. And were ill."
+
+"Not ill--not that time. But you said I'd make a good pudding! You
+remember that, don't you?"
+
+And Peter would recall it all.
+
+Peter would be left. That was the girl's comfort.
+
+She made a beginning at gathering her things together that morning,
+while the boy dozed and the white mice scurried about the little cage.
+She could not take her trunk, or Peter would trace it. She would have
+to carry her belongings, a few at a time, to wherever she found a room.
+Then when Peter came back she could slip away and he would never find
+her.
+
+At noon came the Portier and the sentry, now no longer friends, and rang
+the doorbell. Harmony was rather startled. McLean and Mrs. Boyer had
+been her only callers, and she did not wish to see either of them. But
+after a second ring she gathered her courage in her hands and opened the
+door.
+
+She turned pale when she saw the sentry in his belted blue-gray tunic
+and high cap. She thought, of course, that Jimmy had been traced and
+that now he would be taken away. If the sentry knew her, however, he
+kept his face impassive and merely touched his cap. The Portier stated
+their errand. Harmony's face cleared. She even smiled as the Portier
+extended to her the thumbed score with its missing corner. What,
+after all, does it matter which was right--whether it was A sharp or A
+natural? What really matters is that Harmony, having settled the dispute
+and clinched the decision by running over the score for a page or two,
+turned to find the Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on
+paunch, enjoying a delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in
+sight.
+
+He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where,
+taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders
+back, arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with
+amazing rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the
+little boy in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth,
+and eyes seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with
+one another. When all was over--perhaps when his repertoire was
+exhausted--the sentry returned his nose to the center of his face,
+replaced eyes and mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton
+handkerchief. Then, still in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving
+the youngster enraptured, staring at the doorway.
+
+Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the
+higher part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were many
+unpretentious buildings. She had hunted board there and she knew. It
+was far from the Stadt, far from the fashionable part of town, a
+neighborhood of small shops, of frank indigence. There surely she could
+find a room, and perhaps in one of the small stores what she failed to
+secure in the larger, a position.
+
+Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's wife
+to sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking about for
+a room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small and wretchedly
+furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap dressmaker. The approach
+was forbidding enough. One entered a cavelike, cobble-paved court
+under the building, filled with wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and
+swearing teamsters. From the side a stone staircase took off and led,
+twisting from one landing cave to another, to the upper floor.
+
+Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of
+sewing-machines, the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a
+home but a hiding-place, took the room at once. She was asked for no
+reference. In a sort of agony lest this haven fail her she paid for a
+week in advance. The wooden bed, the cracked mirror over the table, even
+the pigeons outside on the windowsill were hers for a week.
+
+The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.
+
+"I will have it cleaned," she explained. "I have been so busy: the
+masquerade season is on. The Fraulein is American, is she not?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"One knows the Americans. They are chic, not like the English. I have
+some American customers."
+
+Harmony started. The dressmaker was shrewd. Many people hid in the
+sixteenth district. She hastened to reassure the girl.
+
+"They will not disturb you. And just now I have but one, a dancer. I
+shall have the room cleaned. Good-bye, Fraulein."
+
+So far, good. She had a refuge now, one spot that the venom of scandal
+could not poison, where she could study and work--work hard, although
+there could be no more lessons--one spot where Peter would not have to
+protect her, where Peter, indeed, would never find her. This thought,
+which should have brought comfort, brought only new misery. Peace seemed
+dearly bought all at once; shabby, wholesome, hearty Peter, with his
+rough hair and quiet voice, his bulging pockets and steady eyes--she was
+leaving Peter forever, exchanging his companionship for that of a row
+of pigeons on a window-sill. He would find some one, of course; but who
+would know that he liked toast made hard and plenty of butter, or to
+leave his bed-clothing loose at the foot, Peter being very long and apt
+to lop over? The lopping over brought a tear or two. A very teary and
+tragic young heroine, this Harmony, prone to go about for the last day
+or two with a damp little handkerchief tucked in her sleeve.
+
+She felt her way down the staircase and into the cave below. Fate hangs
+by a very slender thread sometimes. If a wagon had not lumbered by as
+she reached the lowest step, so that she must wait and thus had time
+to lower her veil, she would have been recognized at once by the little
+Georgiev, waiting to ascend. But the wagon was there, Harmony lowered
+her veil, the little Georgiev, passing a veiled young woman in the
+gloom, went up the staircase with even pulses and calm and judicial
+bearing, up to the tiny room a floor or two below Harmony's, where he
+wrote reports to the Minister of War and mixed them with sonnets--to
+Harmony.
+
+Harmony went back to the Siebensternstrasse, having accomplished what
+she had set out to do and being very wretched in consequence. Because
+she was leaving the boy so soon she strove to atone for her coming
+defection by making it a gala evening. The child was very happy. She
+tucked him up in the salon, lighted all the candles, served him the
+daintiest of suppers there. She brought in the mice and tied tiny bows
+on their necks; she played checkers with him while the supper dishes
+waited, and went down to defeat in three hilarious games; and last of
+all she played to him, joyous music at first, then slower, drowsier
+airs, until his heavy head dropped on his shoulder and she gathered him
+up in tender arms and carried him to bed.
+
+It was dawn when Marie arrived. Harmony was sleeping soundly when the
+bell rang. Her first thought was that Peter had come back--but Peter
+carried a key. The bell rang again, and she slipped on the old kimono
+and went to the door.
+
+"Is it Peter?" she called, hand on knob.
+
+"I come from Peter. I have a letter," in German.
+
+"Who is it?"
+
+"You do not know me--Marie Jedlicka. Please let me come in."
+
+Bewildered, Harmony opened the door, and like a gray ghost Marie slipped
+by her and into the hall.
+
+There was a gaslight burning very low; Harmony turned it up and faced
+her visitor. She recognized her at once--the girl Dr. Stewart had been
+with in the coffee-house.
+
+"Something has happened to Peter!"
+
+"No. He is well. He sent this to the Fraulein Wells."
+
+"I am the Fraulein Wells."
+
+Marie held out the letter and staggered. Harmony put her in a chair; she
+was bewildered, almost frightened. Crisis of some sort was written on
+Marie's face. Harmony felt very young, very incapable. The other girl
+refused coffee, would not even go into the salon until Peter's letter
+had been read. She was a fugitive, a criminal; the Austrian law is
+severe to those that harbor criminals. Let Harmony read:--
+
+"DEAR HARRY,--Will you forgive me for this and spread the wings of your
+splendid charity over this poor child? Perhaps I am doing wrong in
+sending her to you, but just now it is all I can think of. If she wants
+to talk let her talk. It will probably help her. Also feed her, will
+you? And if she cannot sleep, give her one of the blue powders I fixed
+for Jimmy. I'll be back later to-day if I can make it.
+
+"PETER"
+
+Harmony glanced up from the letter. Marie sat drooping in her chair. Her
+eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her at once, but any
+surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in Peter's apartment was
+sunk in a general apathy, a compound of nervous reaction and fatigue.
+During the long hours in the express she had worn herself out with
+fright and remorse: there was nothing left now but exhaustion.
+
+Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold kitchen
+and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she could in the
+salon, and then went into her room to dress. There she read the letter
+again, and wondered if Peter had gone through life like this, picking up
+waifs and strays and shouldering their burdens for them. Decidedly, life
+with Peter was full of surprises.
+
+She remembered, as she hurried into her clothes; the boys' club back
+in America and the spelling-matches. Decidedly, also, Peter was an
+occupation, a state of mind, a career. No musician, hoping for a career
+of her own, could possibly marry Peter.
+
+That was a curious morning in the old lodge of Maria Theresa, while
+Stewart in the Pension Waldheim struggled back to consciousness, while
+Peter sat beside him and figured on an old envelope the problem of
+dividing among four enough money to support one, while McLean ate his
+heart out in wretchedness in his hotel.
+
+Marie told her story over the early breakfast, sitting with her thin
+elbows on the table, her pointed chin in her palms.
+
+"And now I am sorry," she finished. "It has done no good. If it had only
+killed her but she was not much hurt. I saw her rise and bend over him."
+
+Harmony was silent. She had no stock of aphorisms for the situation, no
+worldly knowledge, only pity.
+
+"Did Peter say he would recover?"
+
+"Yes. They will both recover and go to America. And he will marry her."
+
+Perhaps Harmony would have been less comfortable, Marie less frank, had
+Marie realized that this establishment of Peter's was not on the same
+basis as Stewart's had been, or had Harmony divined her thought.
+
+The presence of the boy was discovered by his waking. Marie was taken
+in and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a
+marvelous people--to have taken into their house and their hearts this
+strange child--if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little slum mind
+was not certain.
+
+In the safety and comfort of the little apartment the Viennese expanded,
+cheered. She devoted herself to the boy, telling him strange folk tales,
+singing snatches of songs for him. The youngster took a liking to her at
+once. It seemed to Harmony, going about her morning routine, that Marie
+was her solution and Peter's.
+
+During the afternoon she took a package to the branch post-office and
+mailed it by parcel-post to the Wollbadgasse. On the way she met Mrs.
+Boyer face to face. That lady looked severely ahead, and Harmony passed
+her with her chin well up and the eyes of a wounded animal.
+
+McLean sent a great box of flowers that day. She put them, for lack of a
+vase, in a pitcher beside Jimmy's bed.
+
+At dusk a telegram came to say that Stewart was better and that Peter
+was on his way down to Vienna. He would arrive at eight. Time was
+very short now--seconds flashed by, minutes galloped. Harmony stewed
+a chicken for supper, and creamed the breast for Jimmy. She fixed the
+table, flowers in the center, the best cloth, Peter's favorite cheese.
+Six o'clock, six-thirty, seven; Marie was telling Jimmy a fairy tale and
+making the fairies out of rosebuds. The studylamp was lighted, the stove
+glowing, Peter's slippers were out, his old smoking-coat, his pipe.
+
+A quarter past seven. Peter would be near Vienna now and hungry. If he
+could only eat his supper before he learned--but that was impossible.
+He would come in, as he always did, and slam the outer door, and open it
+again to close it gently, as he always did, and then he would look for
+her, going from room to room until he found her--only to-night he would
+not find her.
+
+She did not say good-bye to Jimmy. She stood in the doorway and said a
+little prayer for him. Marie had made the flower fairies on needles, and
+they stood about his head on the pillow--pink and yellow and white elves
+with fluffy skirts. Then, very silently, she put on her hat and jacket
+and closed the outer door behind her. In the courtyard she turned and
+looked up. The great chandelier in the salon was not lighted, but from
+the casement windows shone out the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Peter had had many things to think over during the ride down the
+mountains. He had the third-class compartment to himself, and sat in a
+corner, soft hat over his eyes. Life had never been particularly simple
+to Peter--his own life, yes; a matter of three meals a day--he had had
+fewer--a roof, clothing. But other lives had always touched him closely,
+and at the contact points Peter glowed, fused, amalgamated. Thus he had
+been many people--good, indifferent, bad, but all needy. Thus, also,
+Peter had committed vicarious crimes, suffered vicarious illnesses,
+starved, died, loved--vicariously.
+
+And now, after years of living for others, Peter was living at last for
+himself--and suffering.
+
+Not that he understood exactly what ailed him. He thought he was tired,
+which was true enough, having had little sleep for two or three
+nights. Also he explained to himself that he was smoking too much, and
+resolutely--lighted another cigarette.
+
+Two things had revealed Peter's condition to himself: McLean had said:
+"You are crazy in love with her." McLean's statement, lacking subtlety,
+had had a certain quality of directness. Even then Peter, utterly
+miserable, had refused to capitulate, when to capitulate would have
+meant the surrender of the house in the Siebensternstrasse. And the
+absence from Harmony had shown him just where he stood.
+
+He was in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with
+it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly
+it was, this love. Even if Harmony cared--and at the mere thought his
+heart pounded--what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her to
+accept the half of--nothing, to give up a career to share his struggle
+for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty under a
+bushel that he might wave aloft his feeble light!
+
+And there was no way out, no royal road to fortune by the route he had
+chosen; nothing but grinding work, with a result problematical and years
+ahead. There were even no legacies to expect, he thought whimsically.
+Peter had known a chap once, struggling along in gynecology, who had
+had a fortune left him by a G. P., which being interpreted is Grateful
+Patient. Peter's patients had a way of living, and when they did drop
+out, as happened now and then, had also a way of leaving Peter an unpaid
+bill in token of appreciation; Peter had even occasionally helped to
+bury them, by way, he defended himself, of covering up his mistakes.
+
+Peter, sitting back in his corner, allowed the wonderful scenery to slip
+by unnoticed. He put Harmony the Desirable out of his mind, and took
+to calculating on a scrap of paper what could be done for Harmony the
+Musician. He could hold out for three months, he calculated, and still
+have enough to send Harmony home and to get home himself on a slow boat.
+The Canadian lines were cheap. If Jimmy lived perhaps he could take him
+along: if not--
+
+He would have to put six months' work in the next three. That was not so
+hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived on it. Also
+there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in the salon propped in
+a chair and Harmony playing, the room dark save for the glow from the
+stove and for the one candle at Harmony's elbow.
+
+All roads lead to Rome. Peter's thoughts, having traveled in a circle,
+were back again to Harmony the Desirable--Harmony playing in the
+firelight, Harmony Hushed over the brick stove, Harmony paring potatoes
+that night in the kitchen when he--Harmony! Harmony!
+
+Stewart knew all about the accident and its cause. Peter had surmised as
+much when the injured man failed to ask for Marie.
+
+He tested him finally by bringing Marie's name into the conversation.
+Stewart ignored it, accepted her absence, refused to be drawn.
+
+That was at first. During the day, however, as he gained strength, he
+grew restless and uneasy. As the time approached for Peter to leave, he
+was clearly struggling with himself. The landlady had agreed to care
+for him and was bustling about the room. During one of her absences he
+turned to Peter.
+
+"I suppose Marie hasn't been round?"
+
+"She came back last night."
+
+"Did she tell you?"
+
+"Yes, poor child."
+
+"She's a devil!" Stewart said, and lay silent. Then: "I saw her shoot
+that thing out in front of us, but there was no time--Where is she now?"
+
+"Marie? I sent her to Vienna."
+
+Stewart fell back, relieved, not even curious.
+
+"Thank Heaven for that!" he said. "I don't want to see her again. I'd do
+something I'd be sorry for. The kindest thing to say for her is that she
+was not sane."
+
+"No," said Peter gravely, "she was hardly sane."
+
+Stewart caught his steady gaze and glanced away. For him Marie's little
+tragedy had been written and erased. He would forget it magnanimously.
+He had divided what he had with her, and she had repaid him by
+attempting his life. And not only his life, but Anita's. Peter followed
+his line of reasoning easily.
+
+"It's quite a frequent complication, Stewart," he said, "but every man
+to whom it happens regards himself more or less as a victim. She fell in
+love with you, that's all. Her conduct is contrary to the ethics of the
+game, but she's been playing poor cards all along."
+
+"Where is she?"
+
+"That doesn't matter, does it?"
+
+Stewart had lain back and closed his eyes. No, it didn't matter. A sense
+of great relief overwhelmed him. Marie was gone, frightened into hiding.
+It was as if a band that had been about him was suddenly loosed: he
+breathed deep, he threw out his arms and laughed from sheer reaction.
+Then, catching Peter's not particularly approving eyes, he colored.
+
+"Good Lord, Peter!" he said, "you don't know what I've gone through with
+that little devil. And now she's gone!" He glanced round the disordered
+room, where bandages and medicines crowded toilet articles on the
+dressing-table, where one of Marie's small slippers still lay where it
+had fallen under the foot of the bed, where her rosary still hung over
+the corner of the table. "Ring for the maid, Peter, will you! I've got
+to get this junk out of here. Some of Anita's people may come."
+
+During that afternoon ride, while the train clump-clumped down the
+mountains, Peter thought of all this. Some of Marie's "junk" was in his
+bag; her rosary lay in his breastpocket, along with the pin he had sent
+her at Christmas. Peter happened on it, still in its box, which looked
+as if it had been cried over. He had brought it with him. He admired it
+very much, and it had cost money he could ill afford to spend.
+
+It was late when the train drew into the station. Peter, encumbered with
+Marie's luggage and his own, lowered his window and added his voice
+to the chorus of plaintive calls: "Portier! Portier!" they shouted.
+"Portier!" bawled Peter.
+
+He was obliged to resort to the extravagance of a taxicab. Possibly
+a fiacre would have done as well, but it cost almost as much and was
+slower. Moments counted now: a second was an hour, an hour a decade. For
+he was on his way to Harmony. Extravagance became recklessness. As soon
+die for a sheep as a lamb! He stopped the taxicab and bought a bunch of
+violets, stopped again and bought lilies of the valley to combine with
+the violets, went out of his way to the American grocery and bought a
+jar of preserved fruit.
+
+By that time he was laden. The jar of preserves hung in one shabby
+pocket, Marie's rosary dangled from another; the violets were buttoned
+under his overcoat against the cold.
+
+At the very last he held the taxi an extra moment and darted into the
+delicatessen shop across the Siebensternstrasse. From there, standing
+inside the doorway, he could see the lights in the salon across the way,
+the glow of his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. Peter whistled,
+stamped his cold feet, quite neglected--in spite of repeated warnings
+from Harmony--to watch the Herr Schenkenkaufer weigh the cheese,
+accepted without a glance a ten-Kronen piece with a hole in it.
+
+"And how is the child to-day?" asked the Herr Schenkenkaufer, covering
+the defective gold piece with conversation.
+
+"I do not know; I have been away," said Peter. He almost sang it.
+
+"All is well or I would have heard. Wilhelm the Portier was but just now
+here."
+
+"All well, of course," sang Peter, eyes on the comfortable Floor of
+his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. "Auf wiedersehen, Herr
+Schenkenkaufer."
+
+"Auf wiedersehen, Herr Doktor."
+
+Violets, lilies-of-the-valley, cheese, rosary, luggage--thus Peter
+climbed the stairs. The Portier wished to assist him, but Peter
+declined. The Portier was noisy. There was to be a moment when Peter,
+having admitted himself with extreme caution, would present himself
+without so much as a creak to betray him, would stand in a doorway until
+some one, Harmony perhaps--ah, Peter!--would turn and see him. She had a
+way of putting one slender hand over her heart when she was startled.
+
+Peter put down the jar of preserved peaches outside. It was to be a
+second surprise. Also he put down the flowers; they were to be brought
+in last of all. One surprise after another is a cumulative happiness.
+Peter did not wish to swallow all his cake in one bite.
+
+For once he did not slam the outer door, although he very nearly did,
+and only caught it at the cost of a bruised finger. Inside he listened.
+There was no clatter of dishes, no scurrying back and forth from table
+to stove in the final excitement of dishing up. There was, however,
+a highly agreeable odor of stewing chicken, a crisp smell of baking
+biscuit.
+
+In the darkened hall Peter had to pause to steady himself. For he had
+a sudden mad impulse to shout Harmony's name, to hold out his arms, to
+call her to him there in the warm darkness, and when she had come, to
+catch her to him, to tell his love in one long embrace, his arms about
+her, his rough cheek against her soft one. No wonder he grew somewhat
+dizzy and had to pull himself together.
+
+The silence rather surprised him, until he recalled that Harmony was
+probably sewing in the salon, as she did sometimes when dinner was ready
+to serve. The boy was asleep, no doubt. He stole along on tiptoe, hardly
+breathing, to the first doorway, which was Jimmy's.
+
+Jimmy was asleep. Round him were the pink and yellow and white flower
+fairies with violet heads. Peter saw them and smiled. Then, his eyes
+growing accustomed to the light, he saw Marie, face down on the floor,
+her head on her arms. Still as she was, Peter knew she was not sleeping,
+only fighting her battle over again and losing.
+
+Some of the joyousness of his return fled from Peter, never to come
+back. The two silent figures were too close to tragedy. Peter, with a
+long breath, stole past the door and on to the salon. No Harmony there,
+but the great room was warm and cheery. The table was drawn near the
+stove and laid for Abendessen. The white porcelain coffee-pot had
+boiled and extinguished itself, according to its method, and now gently
+steamed.
+
+On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted
+but burning low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little
+money--almost all he had left Harmony when he went away.
+
+Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
+discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the rooms
+revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at last the fact
+stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter refused to accept it. He
+sat for a half-hour or even more by the fire in the salon, obstinately
+refusing to believe she was gone, keeping the supper warm against her
+return. He did not think or reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing,
+hardly moving, save when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he
+was all alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
+outer door.
+
+The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by alarm.
+During all the time that followed, that condition persisted, fright,
+almost terror. Harmony alone in the city, helpless, dependent,
+poverty-stricken. Harmony seeking employment under conditions Peter knew
+too well. But with his alarm came rage.
+
+Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
+gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the
+frightened Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation after
+accusation against some unnamed woman to whom he applied epithets that
+Marie's English luckily did not comprehend. Not a particularly heroic
+figure was Peter that night: a frantic, disheveled individual, before
+whom the Portier cowered, who struggled back to sanity through a berserk
+haze and was liable to swift relapses into fury again.
+
+To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be Peter's
+for many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim determination to keep
+on searching.
+
+There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the cabstands in
+the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The delicatessen seller
+had seen her go out that afternoon with a bundle and return without it.
+She had been gone only an hour or so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that
+she might have found a haven in the neighborhood--until he recalled the
+parcel-post.
+
+One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief, but she
+had also offered the girl a home. She might be at the Boyers'. Peter,
+flinging on a hat and without his overcoat, went to the Boyers'. Time
+was valuable, and he had wasted an hour, two hours, in useless rage. So
+he took a taxicab, and being by this time utterly reckless of cost let
+it stand while he interviewed the Boyers.
+
+Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring. Peter
+was past explanation or ceremonial.
+
+"Is Harmony here?" he demanded.
+
+"Harmony?"
+
+"Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing."
+
+"Come in," said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. "I don't
+know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer."
+
+During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the bedroom, and
+for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter suffered the tortures
+of the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had meant to say by way of protest at
+the intrusion on the sacred privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died
+in her throat. Her plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps
+with guilt. Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet
+story; Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her
+unstayed figure, listened.
+
+"I thought," finished Peter, "that since you had offered her a
+refuge--from me--she might have come here."
+
+"I offered her a refuge--before I had been to the Pension Schwarz."
+
+"Ah!" said Peter slowly. "And what about the Pension Schwarz?"
+
+"Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am obliged
+to say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the girl come here I
+could hardly--Frank, I will speak!--I could hardly have taken her in."
+
+Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling out
+into the hall again. There he thought of something to say in reply,
+repudiation, thought better of it, started down the stairs.
+
+Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he put his
+hand on Peter's shoulder. "You know, old man, I don't believe that.
+These women--"
+
+"I know," said Peter simply. "Thank you. Good-night."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean, from
+Mrs. Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing herself,
+to cutting the threads that bound her to the life in the
+Siebensternstrasse. She had drawn all her money, as Peter discovered
+later. The discovery caused him even more acute anxiety. The city was
+full of thieves; poverty and its companion, crime, lurked on every
+shadowy staircase of the barracklike houses, or peered, red-eyed, from
+every alleyway.
+
+And into this city of contrasts--of gray women of the night hugging
+gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with loathsome gestures, of
+smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths under great mustaches, of dapper
+soldiers to whom the young girl unattended was potential prey, into
+this night city of terror, this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine
+rubbing elbows with frost-nipped flesh, destitution sauntering along
+the fashionable Prater for lack of shelter, gilt wheels of royalty and
+yellow wheels of courtesans--Harmony had ventured alone for the second
+time.
+
+And this time there was no Peter Byrne to accost her cheerily in the
+twilight and win her by sheer friendliness. She was alone. Her funds
+were lower, much lower. And something else had gone--her faith. Mrs.
+Boyer had seen to that. In the autumn Harmony had faced the city
+clear-eyed and unafraid; now she feared it, met it with averted eyes,
+alas! understood it.
+
+It was not the Harmony who had bade a brave farewell to Scatchy and the
+Big Soprano in the station who fled to her refuge on the upper floor of
+the house in the Wollbadgasse. This was a hunted creature, alternately
+flushed and pale, who locked her door behind her before she took off
+her hat, and who, having taken off her hat and surveyed her hiding-place
+with tragic eyes, fell suddenly to trembling, alone there in the
+gaslight.
+
+She had had no plans beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to think
+the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing to eat,
+and the single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no German. The
+dressmaker had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not know where to find
+a restaurant, was afraid to trust herself to the streets alone. She went
+to bed supperless, with a tiny picture of Peter and Jimmy and the wooden
+sentry under her cheek.
+
+The pigeons, cooing on the window-sill, wakened her early. She was
+confused at first, got up to see if Jimmy had thrown off his blankets,
+and wakened to full consciousness with the sickening realization that
+Jimmy was not there.
+
+The dressmaker, whose name was Monia Reiff, slept late after her evening
+out. Harmony, collapsing with hunger and faintness, waited as long as
+she could. Then she put on her things desperately and ventured out.
+Surely at this hour Peter would not be searching, and even if he were he
+would never think of the sixteenth district. He would make inquiries, of
+course--the Pension Schwarz, Boyers', the master's.
+
+The breakfast brought back her strength and the morning air gave her
+confidence. The district, too, was less formidable than the neighborhood
+of the Karntnerstrasse and the Graben. The shops were smaller. The
+windows exhibited cheaper goods. There was a sort of family atmosphere
+about many of them; the head of the establishment in the doorway, the
+wife at the cashier's desk, daughters, cousins, nieces behind the
+wooden counters. The shopkeepers were approachable, instead of familiar.
+Harmony met no rebuffs, was respectfully greeted and cheerfully listened
+to. In many cases the application ended in a general consultation,
+shopkeeper, wife, daughters, nieces, slim clerks with tiny mustaches.
+She got addresses, followed them up, more consultations, more addresses,
+but no work. The reason dawned on her after a day of tramping, during
+which she kept carefully away from that part of the city where Peter
+might be searching for her.
+
+The fact was, of course, that her knowledge of English was her sole
+asset as a clerk. And there were few English and no tourists in the
+sixteenth district. She was marketing a commodity for which there was no
+demand.
+
+She lunched at a Konditorei, more to rest her tired body than because
+she needed food. The afternoon was as the morning. At six o'clock,
+long after the midwinter darkness had fallen, she stumbled back to the
+Wollbadgasse and up the whitewashed staircase.
+
+She had a shock at the second landing. A man had stepped into the angle
+to let her pass. A gasjet dared over his head, and she recognized the
+short heavy figure and ardent eyes of Georgiev. She had her veil down
+luckily, and he gave no sign of recognition. She passed on, and she
+heard him a second later descending. But there had been something
+reminiscent after all in her figure and carriage. The little Georgiev
+paused, halfway down, and thought a moment. It was impossible, of
+course. All women reminded him of the American. Had he not, only the
+day before, followed for two city blocks a woman old enough to be
+his mother, merely because she carried a violin case? But there was
+something about the girl he had just passed--Bah!
+
+A bad week for Harmony followed, a week of weary days and restless
+nights when she slept only to dream of Peter--of his hurt and
+incredulous eyes when he found she had gone; of Jimmy--that he needed
+her, was worse, was dying. More than once she heard him sobbing and
+wakened to the cooing of the pigeons on the window-sill. She grew thin
+and sunken-eyed; took to dividing her small hoard, half of it with her,
+half under the carpet, so that in case of accident all would not be
+gone.
+
+This, as it happened, was serious. One day, the sixth, she came back wet
+to the skin from an all-day rain, to find that the carpet bank had been
+looted. There was no clue. The stolid Hungarian, startled out of her
+lethargy, protested innocence; the little dressmaker, who seemed honest
+and friendly, wept in sheer sympathy. The fact remained--half the small
+hoard was gone.
+
+Two days more, a Sunday and a Monday. On Sunday Harmony played, and
+Georgiev in the room below, translating into cipher a recent conference
+between the Austrian Minister of War and the German Ambassador, put
+aside his work and listened. She played, as once before she had played
+when life seemed sad and tragic, the "Humoresque." Georgiev, hands
+behind his head and eyes upturned, was back in the Pension Schwarz that
+night months ago when Harmony played the "Humoresque" and Peter stooped
+outside her door. The little Bulgarian sighed and dreamed.
+
+Harmony, a little sadder, a little more forlorn each day, pursued her
+hopeless quest. She ventured into the heart of the Stadt and paid a
+part of her remaining money to an employment bureau, to teach English
+or violin, whichever offered, or even both. After she had paid they told
+her it would be difficult, almost impossible without references. She had
+another narrow escape as she was leaving. She almost collided with Olga,
+the chambermaid, who, having clashed for the last time with Katrina, was
+seeking new employment. On another occasion she saw Marie in the crowd
+and was obsessed with a longing to call to her, to ask for Peter, for
+Jimmy. That meeting took the heart out of the girl. Marie was white and
+weary--perhaps the boy was worse. Perhaps Peter--Her heart contracted.
+But that was absurd, of course, Peter was always well and strong.
+
+Two things occurred that week, one unexpected, the other inevitable.
+The unexpected occurrence was that Monia Reiff, finding Harmony being
+pressed for work, offered the girl a situation. The wage was small, but
+she could live on it.
+
+The inevitable was that she met Georgiev on the stairs without her veil.
+
+It was the first day in the workroom. The apprentices were carrying home
+boxes for a ball that night. Thread was needed, and quickly. Harmony,
+who did odds and ends of sewing, was most easily spared. She slipped on
+her jacket and hat and ran down to the shop near by.
+
+It was on the return that she met Georgiev coming down. The afternoon
+was dark and the staircase unlighted. In the gloom one face was as
+another. Georgiev, listening intently, hearing footsteps, drew back
+into the embrasure of a window and waited. His swarthy face was tense,
+expectant. As the steps drew near, were light feminine instead of
+stealthy, the little spy relaxed somewhat. But still he waited,
+crouched.
+
+It was a second before he recognized Harmony, another instant before he
+realized his good fortune. She had almost passed. He put out an unsteady
+hand.
+
+"Fraulein!"
+
+"Herr Georgiev!"
+
+The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes gleamed.
+He struggled against the barrier of language, broke out in passionate
+Bulgar, switched to German punctuated with an English word here and
+there. Made intelligible, it was that he had found her at last. Harmony
+held her spools of thread and waited for the storm of languages to
+subside. Then:--
+
+"But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev."
+
+"No?"
+
+Harmony colored.
+
+"I am--am hiding," she explained. "Something very uncomfortable happened
+and I came here. Please don't say you have seen me."
+
+Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly, with his
+ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed of course. His
+incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had actually been in the
+same building with him while he sought her everywhere else.
+
+"Then," he said at last, "it was you who played Sunday."
+
+"I surely."
+
+She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.
+
+"Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?"
+
+"We shall meet again, of course."
+
+"Fraulein,--with all respect,--sometime perhaps you will walk out with
+me?"
+
+"I am very busy all day."
+
+"At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect, Fraulein!"
+
+Harmony was touched.
+
+"Sometime," she consented. And then impulsively: "I am very lonely, Herr
+Georgiev."
+
+She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and kissed
+it reverently. The Herr Georgiev's father was a nobleman in his own
+country, and all the little spy's training had been to make of a girl
+in Harmony's situation lawful prey. But in the spy's glowing heart there
+was nothing for Harmony to fear. She knew it. He stood, hat in hand,
+while she went up the staircase. Then:--
+
+"Fraulein!" anxiously.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours hat?"
+
+"I saw no one there."
+
+"I thank you, Fraulein."
+
+He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows,
+listened until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he clapped
+his hat on his head and made his cautious way down to the street. There
+was no man in a green velours hat below, but the little spy had an
+uneasy feeling that eyes watched him, nevertheless. Life was growing
+complicated for the Herr Georgiev.
+
+Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a life she
+had never touched before. She discovered, after a day or two in the
+work-room, that Monia Reiff's business lay almost altogether among the
+demi-monde. The sewing-girls, of Marie's type many of them, found in
+the customers endless topics of conversation. Some things Harmony was
+spared, much of the talk being in dialect. But a great deal of it she
+understood, and she learned much that was not spoken. They talked
+freely of the women, their clothes, and they talked a great deal about
+a newcomer, an American dancer, for whom Monia was making an elaborate
+outfit. The American's name was Lillian Le Grande. She was dancing at
+one of the variety theaters.
+
+Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman--a gold brocade
+slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of bodice made of
+gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with Georgiev she met her.
+
+There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping. Monia,
+flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and glanced over the
+girls. She singled out Harmony finally and called her.
+
+"Come and put on the American's gown," she ordered. "She wishes--Heaven
+knows what she wishes!"
+
+Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein Le
+Grande had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when she found
+herself obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one terrible moment
+before the little dressmaker's amused eyes.
+
+"Thou art very lovely, very chic," said Monia. The dress added to
+rather than relieved Harmony's discomfiture. She donned it in one of the
+fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining off a corner
+of the large reception room. The slashed skirt embarrassed her; the low
+cut made her shrink. Monia was frankly entranced. Above the gold tissue
+of the bodice rose Harmony's exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold;
+even her eyes looked golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave
+a pull here, a pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the
+things she made!
+
+She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind the
+curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit more of
+the girl's rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the curtain aside
+and stood smiling.
+
+Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second's silence. Then:--
+
+"Exquisite!" she said in English. Then in halting German: "Do not change
+a line. It is perfect."
+
+Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a glimpse of
+herself and was startled. She had been wearing black for so long, and
+now this radiant golden creature was herself. She was enchanted and
+abashed. The slash in the skirt troubled her: her slender leg had a way
+of revealing itself.
+
+The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered another
+gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the dress and into
+her own shabby frock. On the other side of the curtain the dancer
+was talking. Her voice was loud, but rather agreeable. She smoked a
+cigarette. Scraps of chatter came to Harmony, and once a laugh.
+
+"That is too pink--something more delicate."
+
+"Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek."
+
+"I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night."
+
+"Still no news, Fraulein?"
+
+"None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn't so bad, is it? I could use
+more rouge."
+
+"It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child could be
+stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!"
+
+The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became nasal,
+full of venom.
+
+"Oh, they know well enough," she snapped. "Those nurses know, and
+there's a pig of a red-bearded doctor--I'd like to poison him.
+Separating mother and child! I'm going to find him, if only to show them
+they are not so smart after all."
+
+In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her curtain,
+had clutched at her heart. Jimmy's mother!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony's flight had had nothing to do
+with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and
+besides Peter had indicated that Harmony's absence was purely temporary.
+But the breaking-up was inevitable. All day long the child lay in the
+white bed, apathetic but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies
+for his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite tame, played
+hide-and-seek over the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his
+frantic search for Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to
+him.
+
+He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no
+apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried obediently
+to eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg to be
+taken into the salon, as he once had done. There was a sort of mental
+confusion also. He liked Marie to read his father's letters; but as
+he grew weaker the occasional confusing of Peter with his dead father
+became a fixed idea. Peter was Daddy.
+
+Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony's adjacent
+room and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he
+put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth
+sofa at the foot of Jimmy's bed--lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he
+that the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its
+slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in
+every night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp
+in his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy's thin little
+chest. Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the ears and
+developed lines about his mouth that never left him again. He felt gray
+and old, and sometimes bitter and hard also. The boy's condition could
+not be helped: it was inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was
+eating his heart out had been unnecessary and cruel.
+
+Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he
+wondered how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he hoped
+it was bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night, when the
+lamp burned low and gusts of wind shook the old house, fearful thoughts
+came to him--the canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought reason,
+however. Harmony had been too rational, too sane for such an end.
+
+McLean was Peter's great support in those terrible days. He was young
+and hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to grease the
+machinery of the police service; McLean could and did. In Berlin Harmony
+could not have remained hidden for two days. In Vienna, however, it
+was different. Returns were made to the department, but irregularly.
+An American music student was missing. There were thousands of American
+music students in the city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses.
+McLean offered a reward and followed up innumerable music students.
+
+The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became old and
+haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this difference,
+that with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day.
+With McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following
+morning he went to work with renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after
+all, the iron had not struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a
+life-and-death matter.
+
+Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work. The
+little household went on methodically. Marie remained; there had seemed
+nothing else to do. She cooked Peter's food--what little he would eat;
+she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept
+the apartment neat. She was never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed,
+she seemed to have lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely
+to Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in
+spite of his protests.
+
+The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been music and
+Harmony's soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with
+Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier
+had once vibrated in response to Harmony's violin, almost absolute
+silence now reigned. Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer
+creaked, and the loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had
+been silenced out of deference to the sick child.
+
+On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy's
+mother in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day. McLean
+had sent him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect
+that a young girl answering Harmony's description had been seen in the
+park at Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.
+
+Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had gone out
+together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And it had been as he
+feared--a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing her
+hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.
+
+McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak.
+Then back to the city again.
+
+He had taken to making a daily round, to the master's, to the Frau
+Professor Bergmeister's, along the Graben and the Karntnerstrasse,
+ending up at the Doctors' Club in the faint hope of a letter. Wrath
+still smouldered deep in Peter; he would not enter a room at the club
+if Mrs. Boyer sat within. He had had a long hour with Dr. Jennings,
+and left that cheerful person writhing in abasement. And he had held
+a stormy interview with the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for
+a week, and exceedingly nervous, being of the impression from Peter's
+manner that in the event of Harmony not turning up an American gunboat
+would sail up the right arm of the Danube and bombard the Pension
+Schwarz.
+
+Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the city
+in the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean's elasticity was
+deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into crowds, had taken on a
+strained, concentrated look.
+
+Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man's ultrafashionable
+dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms dangling between his knees,
+his head down. Their common trouble had drawn the two together, or had
+drawn McLean close to Peter, as if he recognized that there were degrees
+in grief and that Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old
+rage at Peter had died. Harmony's flight had proved the situation as no
+amount of protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the
+girl; then he and Peter would start even, and the battle to the best
+man.
+
+They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since he sat
+down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted down from day
+to day such details of their search as might be worth keeping. Now and
+then he glanced at Peter as if he wished to say something, hesitated,
+fell to work again over the notebook. Finally he ventured.
+
+"How's the boy?"
+
+"Not so well to-day. I'm having a couple of men in to see him to-night.
+He doesn't sleep."
+
+"Do you sleep?"
+
+"Not much. He's on my mind, of course."
+
+That and other things, Peter.
+
+"Don't you think--wouldn't it be better to have a nurse. You can't go
+like this all day and be up all night, you know. And Marie has him most
+of the day." McLean, of course, had known Marie before. "The boy ought
+to have a nurse, I think."
+
+"He doesn't move without my hearing him."
+
+"That's an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?"
+
+Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which exasperation
+struggled with fatigue.
+
+"Good Lord, boy," he rasped, "don't you suppose I'd have a nurse if I
+could afford it?"
+
+"Would you let me help? I'd like to do something. I'm a useless cub in
+a sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked in the
+hospital?"
+
+"Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I shouldn't
+let you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but--if he would be
+happier--"
+
+"That's settled, then," said McLean. "Nurse Elisabet, if she can come.
+And--look here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for a week and
+haven't had the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it
+back when you get it, any time, a year or ten years. I'll not miss it."
+
+But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
+
+"I can't take anything now," he said. "But I'll remember it, and if
+things get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to live.
+Marie is a good manager, almost as good as--Harmony was." This with
+difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat
+seemed to close on the name.
+
+That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to
+see Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know,
+would never notice.
+
+At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev,
+got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the
+platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going
+well with him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face
+suspiciously, until they came to a rest on Peter.
+
+It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits
+he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's
+despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a
+touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination,
+recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension
+Schwarz--and built him a little story that was not far from the truth.
+
+Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade,
+when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people,
+when Demel's was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with
+military men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when
+the flower women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in
+roses, when sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the
+Cathedral, when the lottery did the record business of the day.
+
+It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might
+happen on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as in a
+crowd, with people close, touching her, men staring at her, following
+her. He had spent a frightful night in the Opera, scanning seat after
+seat, not so much because he hoped to find her as because inaction was
+intolerable.
+
+And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the
+Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He even
+peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared
+that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in
+the early days of the winter.
+
+Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because
+of the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place
+where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where
+because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as
+it passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser's window, where a
+brilliant light shone on each face that passed.
+
+Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the
+desk spoke of him: "He is there again, the gray man!"
+
+"Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!"
+
+"Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps."
+
+"More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American."
+
+"He is Russian. Look at his size."
+
+"But his shoes!" triumphantly. "They are American, little one."
+
+The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden
+rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.
+
+"I think he is of the police," she said, "or a spy. There is much talk
+of war."
+
+"Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such
+sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white."
+
+"The rose, Fraulein."
+
+The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer.
+The customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange
+intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious
+clutch at her heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to
+fetch the golden rose that was to complete Le Grande's costume.
+
+She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another
+exit.
+
+She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of
+Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking
+along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and
+steady ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.
+
+It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed
+to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for
+her. And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even
+then he had not said he loved her--had not even known it, to be exact.
+Nor had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him
+out of her life.
+
+The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so
+enlightening as to poor Peter's quest, that Peter was growing thin and
+white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own
+position to realize Peter's. With the glimpse of him came a great
+longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy's arms about
+her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating
+harmlessly against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the
+brick stove, for Peter.
+
+Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant,
+at the best, adding to Peter's burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the
+old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the
+respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What
+if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not
+let his mother see him!
+
+Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom
+until eight o'clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked
+over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had
+seen him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping
+watch over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady
+eyes for her.
+
+No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the
+sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places.
+But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her,
+became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see
+once again the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp, the flicker that was
+the fire.
+
+She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She
+put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.
+
+The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted.
+She achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car
+was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was
+white and frightened when she reached the car.
+
+The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
+delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light
+was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the
+money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
+
+The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
+the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky,
+its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by
+the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her.
+Peter's lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight
+from the salon windows. The light was not regular--it disappeared at
+regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some
+one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and
+forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always
+paced the door.
+
+She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
+falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
+cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower
+and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure.
+No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in
+the wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to
+the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of
+the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.
+
+Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's
+windows--and Peter's--opened toward the back of the house, where in
+a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and
+where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless
+desire to see at least the light from the child's room possessed
+Harmony. Even the light would be something; to go like this, to carry
+with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was
+unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden
+and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be
+something.
+
+She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for
+her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her
+window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours
+of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So
+Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the
+corner of the old lodge and thus to the courtyard.
+
+Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving
+shadows; on Jimmy's window-sill a jar of milk. And voices--some one was
+singing.
+
+Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to
+sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little
+song Harmony had been wont to sing:--
+
+"Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human
+eyes. And in the--hereafter--angels may
+
+    Roll--the--stone--from--its--grave--away."
+
+Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether.
+Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down
+the gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a
+minute, two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks
+of the Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old
+city, so very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.
+
+Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away.
+Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood
+by the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered
+Harmony somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the
+night before he went away:--
+
+"Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony."
+
+The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the
+great tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below.
+Peter struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated
+his face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.
+
+"Good-night, Peter," whispered Harmony. "Good-night, dear."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by
+relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about
+again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little
+less florid. But the week's confinement had given him an opportunity to
+think over many things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he
+had packed up the last of Marie's small belongings and sent them down to
+Vienna.
+
+Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. "Just how much talk do you
+suppose this has made, Byrne?" he asked.
+
+"Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it,
+you know."
+
+Stewart's brows contracted.
+
+"Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!"
+
+"Probably."
+
+Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she had
+been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.
+
+"Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?"
+
+"No," doggedly.
+
+"I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but--you can't get away with
+it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and
+not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to
+it."
+
+"She wouldn't understand in a thousand years."
+
+"Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea
+that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow.
+A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a
+man has done with his life before a girl--the right girl--comes into
+it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life
+then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she
+chooses."
+
+"How many would choose under those circumstances?" he jibed.
+
+Peter smiled. "Quite a few," he said cheerfully. "It's a wrong system,
+of course; but we can get a little truth out of it."
+
+"You can't get away with it" stuck in Stewart's mind for several days.
+It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had
+recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell
+Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the
+affair against his conscience and came out victorious.
+
+Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they
+complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the
+bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by
+midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid
+citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her
+traveling. In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in
+the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take
+the baths.
+
+It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after
+the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon's treatment called
+for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and
+rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is
+the remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with
+any hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and
+looked haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to
+leave.
+
+He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and
+mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was
+quiet, and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita's sitting
+room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer
+chair.
+
+Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond
+and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses
+along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light
+was extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train
+crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling
+from burrow to burrow.
+
+The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her
+there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were
+times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked
+into hers with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would
+glance away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps
+the situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her
+by its unusualness.
+
+To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely,
+without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for
+something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than
+ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the
+thing, of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita,
+barely twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the
+world, not so deep as Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would
+have been merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In
+that case she might be less than just, or more.
+
+Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech,
+very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at,
+keenly alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew
+not what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully
+potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger
+on her arm.
+
+He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story--a preamble about his
+upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna,
+his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From
+that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.
+
+It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through
+love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of
+fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him,
+this first evening absolutely alone with her. That and her nearness, and
+the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm. Still he had not touched her.
+
+The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that. General
+credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first. How
+many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from
+chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips
+last. The woman is in his arms before he tells his love. It is by her
+response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the
+thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct.
+Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl's hand, gained
+an encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no
+rebuff would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words?
+They would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify
+it.
+
+But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness stood
+between them and must be painfully taken down.
+
+"I'm afraid this is stupid for you," said Anita out of the silence.
+"Would you like to go to the music-room?"
+
+"God forbid. I was thinking."
+
+"Of what?" Encouragement this, surely.
+
+"I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up."
+
+"Really? I?"
+
+"You know that."
+
+"How did I stir it up?"
+
+"That's hardly the way I meant to put it. You've changed everything for
+me. I care for you--a very great deal."
+
+He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he did not
+touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in this fashion, or
+was he making love?
+
+"I'm very glad you like me."
+
+"Like you!" Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice was
+unmistakable. "It's much more than that, Anita, so much more that I'm
+going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help a little?"
+
+"Yes, if I can." She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.
+
+Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face set and
+dogged.
+
+"Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?"
+
+"No. There's a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all these
+places, isn't there?"
+
+"This was not an accident."
+
+"No?"
+
+"The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send us
+over the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime."
+
+After a brief silence--
+
+"Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?"
+
+"Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman--a girl, Anita. A girl I
+had been living with."
+
+A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For he was
+quivering with dread when he said it--the courage of the man who faces
+a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would have broken into
+speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and was silent. Stewart
+watched her as best he could in the darkness, trying to gather further
+courage to go on. He could not see her face, but her fingers, touching
+the edge of the chair, quivered.
+
+"May I tell you the rest?"
+
+"I don't think I want to hear it."
+
+"Are you going to condemn me unheard?"
+
+"There isn't anything you can say against the fact?"
+
+But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he made
+his plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what had happened
+simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort. And he emphasized the
+lack of sentiment that prompted the arrangement.
+
+Anita spoke then for the first time: "And when you tried to terminate it
+she attempted to kill you!"
+
+"I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then neglected her
+for you."
+
+"Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her."
+
+"It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear that,
+Anita. But lately, in the last month or two, she--I suppose I should
+have seen that she--"
+
+"That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?"
+
+"Nineteen."
+
+A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had watched her
+with wide, almost childish eyes.
+
+"Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train coming
+up?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where is she now?"
+
+"In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came up
+to see me after the--after the accident, sent her away. I think he's
+looking after her. I haven't heard from him."
+
+"Why did you tell me all this?"
+
+"Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me."
+
+"What! After that?"
+
+"That, or something similar, is in many men's lives. They don't tell it,
+that's the difference. I 'm not taking any credit for telling you this.
+I'm ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when I look at your bandaged
+arm I'm suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to tell you. He said I couldn't
+get away with it; some time or other it would come out. Then he said
+something else. He said you'd probably understand, and that if you
+married me it was better to start with a clean slate."
+
+No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of fact, an
+offer--his past against hers, his future with hers. Her hand was steady
+now. The light in the priest's house had been extinguished. The chill of
+the mountain night penetrated Anita's white furs; and set her--or was it
+the chill?--to shivering.
+
+"If I had not told you, would you have married me?"
+
+"I think so. I'll be honest, too. Yes."
+
+"I am the same man you would have married. Only--more honest."
+
+"I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold."
+
+Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas hugged
+the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside was the little
+balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing and looked down,
+down. Some of the arrogance of his new virtue left the man. He was
+suddenly humbled. For the first time he realized a part of what Marie
+had endured in that small room where the light burned.
+
+"Poor little Marie!" he said softly.
+
+The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he could have
+made. Anita rose and held out her hand.
+
+"Go and see her," she said quietly. "You owe her that. We'll be leaving
+here in a day or so and I'll not see you again. But you've been honest,
+and I will be honest, too. I--I cared a great deal, too."
+
+"And this has killed it?"
+
+"I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think."
+
+"But if you are going away--I'm afraid to leave you. You'll think this
+thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you've been taught will
+come--"
+
+"Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise."
+
+He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.
+
+"I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?" humbly.
+
+"I do not want you to kiss me."
+
+He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the darkness. If
+he could only have crushed her to him, made her feel the security of his
+love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier of his own building was
+between them. His voice was husky.
+
+"I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the thing
+that concerns us both--I love you. I never loved the other woman. I
+never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing more like that."
+
+"I shall try to remember."
+
+Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the doctor
+and the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart again. But
+before she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre at the door, she
+went out on the terrace, and looked across to the Villa Waldheim, rising
+from among its clustering trees. Although it was too far to be certain,
+she thought she saw the figure of a man on the little balcony standing
+with folded arms, gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.
+
+Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his promise
+in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of the following
+day, for Vienna. The strain of the confession was over, but he was a
+victim of sickening dread. To one thing only he dared to pin his hopes.
+Anita had said she cared, cared a great deal. And, after all, what else
+mattered? The story had been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of
+queer ideas of right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!
+
+He arrived in Vienna at nine o'clock that night. The imminence of
+his interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a hurried
+supper, and calling up the Doctors' Club by telephone found Peter's
+address in the Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea, of course, that Marie
+was there. He wanted to see Peter to learn where Marie had taken refuge,
+and incidentally to get from Peter a fresh supply of moral courage for
+the interview. For he needed courage. In vain on the journey down had he
+clothed himself in armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment
+in the train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a
+luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this station she
+had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a nap. Ah, but again,
+at this part of the journey he had first seen Anita!
+
+He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter's manner
+of living those days was exceedingly vague. He had respected Peter's
+reticence, after the manner of men with each other. Peter had once
+mentioned a boy he was looking after, in excuse for leaving so soon
+after the accident. That was all.
+
+The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted. The
+street was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart found the
+gate. Even then he lost the path, and found himself among a group of
+trees, to touch the lowest branches of any of which resulted in a shower
+of raindrops. To add to his discomfort some one was walking in the
+garden, coming toward him with light, almost stealthy steps.
+
+Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached, were
+very close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness that even then
+all he saw was a blacker shadow, and that was visible only because it
+moved. Then a hand touched his arm, stopped as if paralyzed, drew back
+slowly, fearfully.
+
+"Good Heavens!" said poor Harmony faintly.
+
+"Please don't be alarmed. I have lost the path." Stewart's voice was
+almost equally nervous. "Is it to the right or the left?"
+
+It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:--
+
+"To the right a dozen paces or so."
+
+"Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it."
+
+"I know it quite well. Please don't bother."
+
+The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn on
+Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking God's own
+language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance, they made the path.
+
+"The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order."
+
+"Are you not coming in?"
+
+"No. I--I do not live here."
+
+She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark facade
+of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment later heard
+the closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort of curious place
+was this, a great looming house that concealed in its garden a fugitive
+American girl who came and went like a shadow, leaving only the memory
+of a sweet voice strained with fright?
+
+Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the Portier
+gave him and followed the gentleman's gruff directions up the staircase.
+Peter admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as well he might with Marie
+in the salon.
+
+Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter's expression. He shook the
+rain off his hat, smiling.
+
+"How are you?" asked Peter dutifully.
+
+"Pretty good, except for a headache when I'm tired. What sort of a place
+have you got here anyhow, Byrne?"
+
+"Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa," replied Peter, still preoccupied
+with Marie and what was coming. "Rather interesting old place."
+
+"Rather," commented Stewart, "with goddesses in the garden and all the
+usual stunts."
+
+"Goddesses?"
+
+"Ran into one just now among the trees. 'A woman I forswore, but thou
+being a goddess I forswore not thee.' English-speaking goddess, by
+George!"
+
+Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and grasped
+his arm in fingers of steel.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in the
+garden?"
+
+Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle a
+situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.
+
+"I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke through a
+hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the compass--"
+
+Peter's fingers closed.
+
+"Quick," he said.
+
+Stewart's manner lost its jauntiness.
+
+"There was a girl there," he said shortly. "Couldn't see her. She spoke
+English. Said she didn't live here, and broke for the gate the minute I
+got to the path."
+
+"You didn't see her?"
+
+"No. Nice voice, though. Young."
+
+The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was running
+down the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to the Portier to
+unlock the door, was a madman in everything but purpose. The Portier let
+him out and returned to the bedroom.
+
+"The boy above is worse," he said briefly. "A strange doctor has just
+come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug store."
+
+The Portier's wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled her
+eyes.
+
+"What can one expect?" she demanded. "The good Herr Gott has forbidden
+theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the druggist has gone to
+visit his wife's mother."
+
+"Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up."
+
+"And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I shall
+go."
+
+Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.
+
+Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found Peter's
+excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived, an old house,
+isolated in a garden where rambled young women with soft voices. Hello,
+a youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.
+
+He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie. The place
+was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the indescribable odor of
+drugs that meant illness. He remembered that the boy was frail.
+
+Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose,
+white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each other.
+Marie's crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger than speech. It
+was after a distinct pause that she spoke.
+
+"Hast thou brought the police?"
+
+Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart's mental
+condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it was with
+tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And yet--
+
+"So it's old Peter now, is it?"
+
+"No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all. I swear
+it. I look after the boy."
+
+"Who else is here?"
+
+"No one else; but--"
+
+"Tell that rot to some one who does not know you."
+
+"It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not lie."
+There was a catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men somewhat, but she
+still cherished the feminine belief that jealousy is love, whereas it is
+only injured pride. She took a step toward him. "Walter, I am sorry. Do
+you hate me?" She had dropped the familiar "thou."
+
+Stewart crossed the room until only Peter's table and lamp stood between
+them.
+
+"I didn't mean to be brutal," he said, rather largely, entirely
+conscious of his own magnanimity. "It was pretty bad up there and I
+know it. I don't hate you, of course. That's hardly possible
+after--everything."
+
+"You--would take me back?"
+
+"No. It's over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that's all; to
+see that you were comfortable and not frightened. You're a silly child
+to think of the police."
+
+Marie put a hand to her throat.
+
+"It is the American, of course."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. "Then I wish I had
+killed her!"
+
+No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman for her
+rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation in hand and
+Marie only feebly formidable, was rather amused and flattered by the
+honest fury in her voice. The mouse was under his paw; he would play a
+bit. "You'll get over feeling that way, kid. You don't really love me."
+
+"You were my God, that is all."
+
+"Will you let me help you--money, I mean?"
+
+"Keep it for her."
+
+"Peter will be here in a minute." He bent over the table and eyed her
+with his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. "Come round here and
+kiss me for old times."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Come."
+
+She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a step or
+two toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew himself up.
+
+"You are quite right and I'm a rotter." Marie's English did not
+comprehend "rotter," but she knew the tone. "Listen, Marie, I've told
+the other girl, and there's a chance for me, anyhow. Some day she may
+marry me. She asked me to see you."
+
+"I do not wish her pity."
+
+"You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say, without a
+dot. There is a chance in America for a clever girl. You are clever,
+little Marie. The first money I can spare I'll send you--if you'll take
+it. It's all I can do."
+
+This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled from
+him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an explanation.
+When at last she understood that he was sincere, she broke down.
+Stewart, playing a new part and raw in it, found the situation
+irritating. But Marie's tears were not entirely bitter. Back of them her
+busy young mind was weaving a new warp of life, with all of America for
+its loom. Hope that had died lived again. Before her already lay that
+great country where women might labor and live by the fruit of their
+labor, where her tawdry past would be buried in the center of distant
+Europe. New life beckoned to the little Marie that night in the old
+salon of Maria Theresa, beckoned to her as it called to Stewart,
+opportunity to one, love and work to the other. To America!
+
+"I will go," she said at last simply. "And I will not trouble you
+there."
+
+"Good!" Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick
+gesture she held it to her cheek, dropped it.
+
+Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He had
+not found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well, still in
+Vienna, and--she had come back! She had cared then enough to come back.
+To-morrow he would commence again, would comb the city fine, and when
+he had found her he would bring her back, the wanderer, to a marvelous
+welcome.
+
+He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few
+belongings by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still stained
+with tears but radiant with hope.
+
+"Peter," she said gravely, "I must prepare my outfit. I go to America."
+
+"With Stewart?"
+
+"Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am very
+happy, although--Peter, may I kiss you?"
+
+"Certainly," said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her thin
+shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who had cared
+enough to come back.
+
+"Life," said Peter soberly, "life is just one damned thing after
+another, isn't it?"
+
+But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.
+
+The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She said:--
+
+"I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt you
+very much--but not, believe me, without hurting myself. Perhaps my
+uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing you, that I am not
+so big as you thought I would be. For now, in this final letter, I can
+tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear, I did care!
+
+"But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have gone
+very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy as I have
+does not support me to-night, that all my little rules of life are
+inadequate. Individual liberty was one--but there is no liberty of the
+individual. Life--other lives--press too closely. You, living your life
+as seemed best and easiest, and carrying down with you into shipwreck
+the little Marie and--myself!
+
+"For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It is not
+only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady revolt
+and loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest before one
+succumbs to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred that is a part of
+me and that would never forget.
+
+"You say that you are the same man I would have married, only more
+honest for concealing nothing. But--and forgive me this, it insists on
+coming up in my mind--were you honest, really? You told me, and it took
+courage, but wasn't it partly fear? What motive is unmixed? Honesty--and
+fear, Walter. You were preparing against a contingency, although you may
+not admit this to yourself.
+
+"I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am only
+trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break is final. The
+revolt is in myself, against something sordid and horrible which I will
+not take into my life. And for that reason time will make no difference.
+
+"I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great deal of
+this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter--home and children, the
+love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals. And you ask me to
+start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know you are resentful, but--I
+know that you understand.
+
+"ANITA."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine was
+threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with Bulgaria
+sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing troops, and there
+were long conferences in the Burg between the Emperor and various
+bearded gentlemen, while the military prayed in the churches for war.
+
+The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on all day
+in the small room below Harmony's on the Wollbadgasse. At night,
+when the man in the green velours hat took a little sleep, mysterious
+packages were carried down the whitewashed staircase and loaded into
+wagons waiting below. Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the
+pigeons a carrier pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.
+
+On the morning after Harmony's flight from the garden in the Street
+of Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She had put in
+a sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She charged herself with
+cowardice in running away from Peter and Jimmy when they needed her, and
+in going back like a thief the night before. The conviction that the boy
+was not so well brought with it additional introspection--her sacrifice
+seemed useless, almost childish. She had fled because two men thought
+it necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and she
+did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had promised
+herself, had been promised. But this career, for which she had given up
+everything else--would she find it in the workroom of a dressmaker?
+
+Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose--how her cheeks burned
+when she thought of it!--suppose she had taken Peter at his word and
+married him? What about Peter's career? Was there any way by which
+Peter's poverty for one would be comfort for two? Was there any
+reason why Peter, with his splendid ability, should settle down to the
+hack-work of general practice, the very slough out of which he had so
+painfully climbed?
+
+Either of two things--go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or stay
+where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew. There in
+the little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held out her arms
+longingly. "Peter!" she said. "Peter, dear!"
+
+She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no one.
+The instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at any cost
+outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard and tired, looking
+out. It was Harmony's chance, perhaps, to do a big thing; to prove
+herself bigger than her fears, stronger than convention. But she was
+young, bewildered, afraid. And there was this element, stronger than
+any of the others--Peter had never told her he loved her. To go back,
+throwing herself again on his mercy, was unthinkable. On his love--that
+was different. But what if he did not love her? He had been good to her;
+but then Peter was good to every one.
+
+There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his mother?
+Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose he were to die
+and his mother not see him? Harmony's sense of fairness rebelled. In the
+small community at home mother was sacred, her claims insistent.
+
+It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on the sill;
+over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous strip foretold the
+sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the market, lumbered along the
+streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony rose and lighted her fire, drew on
+her slippers and the faded silk kimono with the pink butterflies.
+
+In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early morning
+dreams of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining customers.
+
+Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in order, fed
+the pigeons,--it was then she saw the carrier with its message,--made
+her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside the stove. And all the
+time, moving quietly through her morning routine, she was there in that
+upper room in body only.
+
+In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in the
+Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the hutch, and
+Peter, with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed, toilet-table,
+coffee-pot, Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise over the church roof,
+and Peter again. Always Peter!
+
+Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear her,
+muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the Hungarian
+maid for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one of her new
+duties to prepare the workroom for the day. The luminous streak above
+the church was rose now, time for the day to begin.
+
+She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the door, so
+faint was the sound.
+
+She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony, expecting
+Monia, called "Come in."
+
+It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face. He
+stood in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear toward the
+stairway. It was very silent. Monia was drinking her coffee in bed,
+whither she had retired for warmth.
+
+"Pardon!" said the Bulgarian in a whisper. "I listened until I heard you
+moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!"
+
+"Something has happened!" exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter, of
+course.
+
+"Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor to
+open your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I fear--on
+the sill, Fraulein."
+
+Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once, but the
+carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and set about its
+breakfast.
+
+"Will he let me catch him?"
+
+"Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter--"
+
+"Come in, of course."
+
+Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A handful of
+grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown! Georgiev caught
+the pigeon and drew the message from the tube. Even Harmony grasped the
+seriousness of the situation. The little Bulgarian's face, from gray
+became livid; tiny beads of cold sweat came out on his forehead.
+
+"What have I done?" cried Harmony. "Oh, what have I done? If I had known
+about the pigeon--"
+
+Georgiev recovered himself.
+
+"The Fraulein can do nothing wrong," he said. "It is a matter of an
+hour's delay, that is all. It may not be too late."
+
+Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee. The
+sulky Hungarian brought it without a glance in their direction.
+
+"Too late for what?"
+
+"Fraulein, if I may trouble you--but glance from the window to the
+street below. It is of an urgency, or I--Please, Fraulein!"
+
+Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind
+her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in her head.
+
+"Only a man in a green hat," she said. "And down the street a group of
+soldiers."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.
+
+"They are coming for you?"
+
+"It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna."
+
+"And I with the pigeon--Oh, it's too horrible! Herr Georgiev, stay here
+in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is mine--"
+
+"Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the
+pigeon. It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but a
+matter of--imprisonment."
+
+"There must be something I can do," desperately. "I hear them below. Is
+there no way to the roof, no escape?"
+
+"None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of
+peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you."
+
+"You are not going down!"
+
+"Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly,
+and not for a lady to confront."
+
+"They are coming up!"
+
+He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
+unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest,
+turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.
+
+His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.
+
+"Fraulein," he said huskily, "you are very lovely. I carry always in my
+heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu."
+
+He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down
+the staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap
+on the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have
+feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable
+like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as
+unobtrusively as he had entered it.
+
+The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
+washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered
+what was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief
+are great moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message,
+English, German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.
+
+"The Herr Georgiev has been arrested," she wrote. An hour later the
+carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over
+the church roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life.
+Grim-visaged war had touched her and passed on.
+
+The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building
+followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned
+out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden
+hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor was found stored a quantity of
+ammunition.
+
+It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished,
+when the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the
+chattering sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way
+to her dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.
+
+She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully
+descended.
+
+"I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live."
+
+The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her
+ears; the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from
+the workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition
+boxes on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.
+
+Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in,
+toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.
+
+"You!" she said.
+
+The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, "Yea, yea," and
+"Nay, nay."
+
+"Yes, Fraulein."
+
+Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal, infinitely
+touching.
+
+"You will not say that you have found, have seen me?"
+
+"No, Fraulein."
+
+It was in Harmony's mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to learn--of
+Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that belonged to the old
+life in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was no time. The sentry's
+impassive face became rigid; he looked through her, not at her. Harmony
+turned.
+
+The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was no
+further chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the boxes
+down the staircase.
+
+Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in the
+market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in the
+Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony's golden head as she bent over a bit
+of chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the whitewashed staircase
+her heavy cans of milk; on the carrier pigeon winging its way to the
+south; beating in through bars to the exalted face of Herr Georgiev;
+resting on Peter's drooping shoulders, on the neglected mice and the
+wooden soldier, on the closed eyes of a sick child--the worshiped sun,
+peering forth--the golden window of the East.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through
+the night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had
+been times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With
+the daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of
+hope, enough to make harder Peter's acceptance of the inevitable.
+
+The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened
+his eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter
+died many deaths that night.
+
+At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie,
+creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently
+asleep and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at
+her footstep and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He
+motioned her back.
+
+"But you must have a little sleep, Peter."
+
+"No. I'll stay until--Go back to bed. It is very early."
+
+Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now
+it was useless. At eight o'clock he let Marie take his place, then he
+bathed and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another
+night. For the child's release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast,
+but managed only a cup of coffee.
+
+Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was
+insistent--the boy's mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her.
+Peter might know in his heart that he had done the best thing for the
+child, but like Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse
+him. He had separated mother and child. Who was he to have decided the
+mother's unfitness, to have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the
+lives of others in his hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where;
+the boy dying without his mother. Whatever that mother might be, her
+place that day was with her boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He
+was humbled as well as stricken, poor Peter!
+
+In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the
+mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter,
+signed only "Mamma," was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.
+
+"And for Heaven's sake be quick," wrote Peter. "This is a matter of
+hours. I meant well, but I've done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no
+matter what she is or where you find her." The Portier carried the note.
+When he came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and
+a lettuce leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and
+amuse the boy. He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. "He saw
+it not," he reported sadly to his wife. "Be off to the church while
+I deliver this letter. And this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in
+remembrance."
+
+At eleven o'clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair
+sofa.
+
+"He asks for you."
+
+Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy's eyes were open and
+fixed on him.
+
+"Is it another day?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, boy; another morning."
+
+"I am cold, Peter."
+
+They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he
+could see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very
+humble, found himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To
+see this small soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a
+bit of light for the journey! Peter's religion had been one of life and
+living, not of creed.
+
+Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.
+
+"He knows, poor little one!" she whispered.
+
+And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of
+broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the
+cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from
+the boy.
+
+"One is sick, Jimmy boy," he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and
+shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:--
+
+"If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?"
+
+"Yes, honey, I think so."
+
+The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind
+too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed
+eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter
+bent over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.
+
+"What is it, dear?"
+
+"I'm afraid--it's going to die!"
+
+"Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?" asked Peter gently. "To go to
+heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer
+and the sun always shines?"
+
+No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed
+its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their
+dead mother.
+
+"Is there grass?"
+
+"Yes--soft green grass."
+
+"Do--boys in heaven--go in their bare feet?" Ah, small mind and heart,
+so terrified and yet so curious!
+
+"Indeed, yes." And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted
+such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint--a
+heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of
+dear departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees
+in fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with
+smiling eyes and death in his heart, a child's heaven of games and
+friendly Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.
+
+The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was
+increasingly an effort.
+
+"I should--like--to go there," he whispered at last.
+
+He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk
+he roused again.
+
+"I would like--to see--the sentry," he said with difficulty.
+
+And so again, and for the last time, Rosa's soldier from Salzburg with
+one lung.
+
+Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed
+muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears. Monia, upset over the
+morning's excitement, was irritable and unreasonable. The gold-tissue
+costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint. Below in the
+courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where
+the morning had seen such occurrences.
+
+At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of
+salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of
+playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour
+of the day. To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia
+quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the
+pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play
+such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her
+whole beautiful face and body glowing with the melody she made, the
+girls found the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she
+did not suspect it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the workroom.
+She was not of the people, they said--the daughter of a great American,
+of course, run away to escape a loveless marriage. This was borne out
+by the report of one of them who had glimpsed the silk petticoat. It
+was rumored also that she wore no chemise, but instead an infinitely
+coquettish series of lace and nainsook garments--of a fineness!
+
+Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not played
+since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to Peter as she
+had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little Georgiev as he went
+down the staircase. And finally with a choke in her throat to the little
+mother back home, so hopeful, so ignorant.
+
+In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of the day
+at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd and coming back
+quickly through the winter night. The staircase was always a peril, to
+be encountered and conquered night after night and even in the daytime
+not to be lightly regarded. On her way up this night she heard steps
+ahead, heavy, measured steps that climbed steadily without pauses. For
+an instant Harmony thought it sounded like Peter's step and she went
+dizzy.
+
+But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had stood
+that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels in, toes out,
+chest out, was the sentry.
+
+Harmony's first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the
+building. Then she saw that the sentry's impassive face wore lines of
+trouble. He saluted. "Please, Fraulein."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I have not told the Herr Doktor."
+
+"I thank you."
+
+"But the child dies."
+
+"Jimmy?"
+
+"He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps, but of
+moments."
+
+Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. "You are sure? You
+are not telling me so that I will go back?"
+
+"He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours. My
+wife, Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and her cousin,
+the wife of the Portier, weeps over the stove. Please, Fraulein, come
+with me."
+
+"When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?"
+
+"But now."
+
+"And he still lives?"
+
+"Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you."
+
+Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all that was
+personal and small and frightened, before the reality of death. She
+rose, as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis; ceased trembling,
+got her hat and coat and her shabby gloves and joined the sentry again.
+Another moment's delay--to secure the Le Grande's address from Monia.
+Then out into the night, Harmony to the Siebensternstrasse, the tall
+soldier to find the dancer at her hotel, or failing that, at the
+Ronacher Music-Hall.
+
+Harmony took a taxicab--nothing must be spared now--bribed the chauffeur
+to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across the garden, still
+tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper flight, and rang the
+bell.
+
+Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was
+nothing to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in hand,
+alone, drear, tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw Harmony and
+went white, holding to the back of his chair. Their eyes met, agony
+and hope in them, love and death, rapture and bitterness. In Harmony's,
+pleading, promise, something of doubt; in Peter's, only yearning, as of
+empty arms. Then Harmony dared to look at the bed and fell on her knees
+in a storm of grief beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her
+hair.
+
+Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the immense
+theater waiters scurried back and forward among the tables. Everywhere
+was the clatter of silver and steel on porcelain, the clink of glasses.
+Smoke was everywhere--pipes, cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between
+bites at the tables, using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a
+gold one shone here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners,
+spraying the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the
+stage sat the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph. They
+were drinking cheap native wines and were very happy.
+
+From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the people to
+her.
+
+"In the box--don't stare, Liebchen, he looks--is the princeling I have
+told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids."
+
+"Last night! Were you here?" He coughed.
+
+"I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when she
+finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and tosses
+them to her."
+
+"Shameless! Is she so beautiful?"
+
+"No. But you shall see. She comes."
+
+Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the program;
+and because she sang in American, which is not exactly English and more
+difficult to understand, her songs were considered exceedingly risque.
+As a matter of fact they were merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to
+them that caught the Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentimental
+ditties and the artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another
+reason for her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen
+pickaninnies.
+
+In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the
+little chorus had made good.
+
+Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind
+her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet
+coats and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a pair sat on the
+boot.
+
+Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing against
+dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by cigarettes and
+absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled their American prototypes
+as the night resembles the day.
+
+She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
+rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve little
+darkies.
+
+She sang "Dixie," of course, and the "Old Folks at Home"; then a ragtime
+medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and clogging with
+all their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a whirling, nimble
+dance. The little rhinestones on her stockings flashed; her opulent
+bosom quivered. The Dozent, eyes on the dancer, squeezed his companion's
+hand.
+
+"I love thee!" he whispered, rather flushed.
+
+And then she sang "Doan ye cry, mah honey." Her voice, rather coarse but
+melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing and lilt of the
+lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling, preternaturally solemn,
+linked arms and swayed rhythmically, right, left, right, left. The
+glasses ceased clinking; sturdy citizens forgot their steak and beer
+for a moment and listened, knife and fork poised. Under the table the
+Dozent's hand pressed its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer
+on Le Grande, but on the woman across, his sweetheart, she who would
+be mother of his children. The words meant little to the audience; the
+rich, rolling Southern lullaby held them rapt:--
+
+     "Doan ye Cry, mah honey--
+     Doan ye weep no mo',
+     Mammy's gwine to hold her baby,
+     All de udder black trash sleepin' on the flo',"
+
+The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.
+
+She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against her
+breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The crowd
+applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung them. Glasses
+and dishes clinked again.
+
+The Dozent bent across the table.
+
+"Some day--" he said.
+
+The girl blushed.
+
+Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little troupe.
+A motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off, rounded them up
+like a flock of chickens.
+
+And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier of the
+old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room. For a moment
+gold dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted each other. Then the
+sentry touched his cap.
+
+"Madam," he said, "the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and to-night
+he dies."
+
+"What child?" Her arms were full of flowers.
+
+"The child from the hospital. Please to make haste."
+
+Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with one hand
+in Harmony's and one between Peter's two big ones.
+
+Toward the last he called Peter "Daddy" and asked for a drink. His eyes,
+moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the grayfaced woman
+in a gold dress who stood staring down at him, rested a moment on the
+cage of mice, came to a stop in the doorway, where stood the sentry,
+white and weary, but refusing rest.
+
+It was Harmony who divined the child's unspoken wish.
+
+"The manual?" she whispered.
+
+The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across from
+the old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but no lack of
+vigor, went again through the Austrian manual of arms, and because he
+had no carbine he used Peter's old walking-stick.
+
+When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay still.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony he
+loved her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had about given
+out, and there was no way to get more save by earning it. The drain of
+Jimmy's illness, the inevitable expense of the small grave and the tiny
+stone Peter had insisted on buying, had made retreat his only course.
+True, Le Grande had wished to defray all expenses, but Peter was
+inexorable. No money earned as the dancer earned hers should purchase
+peaceful rest for the loved little body. And after seeing Peter's eyes
+the dancer had not insisted.
+
+A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference between
+Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart raised the money
+somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and eager, with the pin he had
+sent her to Semmering at her throat. She kissed Peter on the cheek in
+the station, rather to his embarrassment. From the lowered window, as
+the train pulled out, she waved a moist handkerchief.
+
+"I shall be very good," she promised him. The last words he heard above
+the grinding of the train were her cheery: "To America!"
+
+Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food
+where he might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the
+delicatessen shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the
+house in the Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until
+Marie's small preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter
+was at the station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her
+address. She wrote:--
+
+"You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before
+and that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in
+the Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have
+been trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for
+me. You must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I
+am managing well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening
+lesson, and soon I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can
+see how things are looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to
+renew my music lessons. And then, Peter,--the career!
+
+"HARMONY."
+
+Her address was beneath.
+
+Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with
+the letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer
+her nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps,
+surely, everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only
+once taken the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life
+itself to him. But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in
+everything else, had sapped his confidence.
+
+He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself
+confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined
+face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child's head
+against its breast.
+
+So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must
+let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to
+success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had
+proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care
+of herself in the old city. Only--to go away and leave her there!
+
+McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in the
+Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen
+during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony's every word, every
+gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard work began to tell on
+her, McLean's devotion would win its reward. McLean's devotion, with
+all that it meant, the lessons again, community of taste, their common
+youth! Peter felt old, very tired.
+
+Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his gray
+suit to the Portier's wife to be pressed, and getting out his surgical
+case, as he had once before in the Pension Schwarz, he sewed a button
+on his overcoat, using the curved needle and the catgut and working with
+surgeon's precision. Then, still working very carefully, he trimmed the
+edges of graying hair over his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best
+silk tie, now almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not
+coming, he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy's room to feed
+the mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with his face
+working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside table.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his defeat
+and approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them. Then he decided
+against this palpable appeal for sympathy, elected to go empty-handed
+and discover merely how comfortable she was or was not. When the time
+came he would slip out of her life, sending her a letter and leaving
+McLean on guard.
+
+Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase--where Harmony
+had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down to his
+death--climbed steadily, but without his usual elasticity. The place
+appalled him--its gloom, its dinginess, its somber quiet. In the
+daylight, with the pigeons on the sills and the morning sunlight
+printing the cross of the church steeple on the whitewashed wall, it was
+peaceful, cloisterlike, with landings that were crypts. But at night it
+was almost terrifying, that staircase.
+
+Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper landing,
+playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He waited outside
+before ringing, heard her begin something determinedly cheerful, falter,
+cease altogether. Peter rang.
+
+Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps--oh, certainly she had expected
+him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how she was getting
+on, how she was housed. She held out her hand and Peter took it. Still
+no words, only a half smile from her and no smile at all from Peter, but
+his heart in his eyes.
+
+"I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room."
+
+"You knew I would come," said Peter. "The reception room?"
+
+"Where customers wait." She still carried her violin, and slipped back
+to her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its
+meagerness. He drew a long breath.
+
+Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen knitting a
+stocking. The reception room was warm from the day's fire, and in order.
+All the pins and scraps of the day had been swept up, and the portieres
+that made fitting-rooms of the corners were pushed back. Peter saw
+only a big room with empty corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were
+Harmony's.
+
+He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet settee. They
+were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first time. In the squalor
+of the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable intimacies of the Street of
+Seven Stars, they had been easy, unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was
+tongue-tied. Only one thing in him clamored for utterance, and that he
+sternly silenced.
+
+"I--I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?"
+
+"No. Of course, I understood."
+
+"You were not angry?"
+
+"Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I needed
+you. Only, of course,--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I'll not say that, I think."
+
+"Please say it, Peter!"
+
+Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.
+
+"Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me, only--"
+
+"Only--I always need you!" Peter, Peter!
+
+"Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs a
+woman; but--"
+
+"Well, of course--but--I'm generally in trouble, Harry dear."
+
+Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of his
+weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by stooping for a
+neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had stuck it in his lapel he
+had saved his mental forces from the rout of Harmony's eyes.
+
+His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most
+delectable look in the aforesaid eyes.
+
+"I didn't come to be silly," he said to the table. "I hate people who
+whine, and I've got into a damnable habit of being sorry for myself!
+It's to laugh, isn't it, a great, hulking carcass like me, to be--"
+
+"Peter," said Harmony softly, "aren't you going to look at me?"
+
+"I'm afraid."
+
+"That's cowardice. And I've fixed my hair a new way. Do you like it?"
+
+"Splendid," said Peter to the center table.
+
+"You didn't look!"
+
+The rout of Harmony's eyes was supplemented by the rout of Harmony's
+hair. Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony was half
+exasperated; she would have boxed Peter's ears with a tender hand had
+she dared.
+
+His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced her at
+last.
+
+"First of all," he said, "I am going back to America, Harmony. I've
+got all I can get here, all I came for--" He stopped, seeing her face.
+"Well, of course, that's not true, I haven't. But I'm going back,
+anyhow. You needn't look so stricken: I haven't lost my chance. I'll
+come back sometime again and finish, when I've earned enough to do it."
+
+"You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money on
+others, and now you are going back just where you were, and--you are
+leaving me here alone!"
+
+"You are alone, anyhow," said Peter, "making your own way and getting
+along. And McLean will be here."
+
+"Are you turning me over to him?"
+
+No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.
+
+"Peter!"
+
+"Yes, dear?"
+
+"Do you remember the night in Anna's room at the Schwartz when you
+proposed to me?"
+
+No reply. Peter found another pin.
+
+"And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?"
+
+Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young figure,
+her luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.
+
+"Peter, I want you to--to ask me again."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Now, listen to me, Harmony. You're sorry for me, that's all; I don't
+want to be pitied. You stay here and work. You'll do big things. I had a
+talk with the master while I was searching for you, and he says you
+can do anything. But he looked at me--and a sight I was with worry and
+fright--and he warned me off, Harmony. He says you must not marry."
+
+"Old pig!" said Harmony. "I will marry if I please."
+
+Nevertheless Peter's refusal and the master's speech had told somewhat.
+She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood close, looking
+down at her.
+
+"I've said a lot I didn't mean to," he said. "There's only one thing I
+haven't said, I oughtn't to say it, dear. I'm not going to marry you--I
+won't have such a thing on my conscience. But it doesn't hurt a woman
+to know that a man loves her. I love you, dear. You're my heaven and my
+earth--even my God, I'm afraid. But I will not marry you."
+
+"Not even if I ask you to?"
+
+"Not even then, dear. To share my struggle--"
+
+"I see," slowly. "It is to be a struggle?"
+
+"A hard fight, Harmony. I'm a pauper practically."
+
+"And what am I?"
+
+"Two poverties don't make a wealth, even of happiness," said Peter
+steadily. "In the time to come, when you would think of what you might
+have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me, dear."
+
+"People have married, women have married and carried on their work, too,
+Peter."
+
+"Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of man,
+Harry. I'm jealous--jealous of every one about you. It would have to be
+the music or me."
+
+"And you make the choice!" said Harmony proudly. "Very well, Peter, I
+shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious sort of love."
+
+"I wonder," Peter cried, "if you realize what love it is that loves you
+enough to give you up."
+
+"You have not asked me if I care, Peter."
+
+Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very
+beautiful.
+
+"I'm afraid to ask," said Peter, and picking up his hat he made for the
+door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.
+
+"My sweetest heart!" he cried, and took her in his hungry arms. But even
+then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her slender body held
+to him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to her soft throat, Peter put
+her from him as a starving man might put away food.
+
+He held her off and looked at her.
+
+"I'm a fool and a weakling," he said gravely. "I love you so much that I
+would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my girl! As long as I
+live I shall carry your image in my heart."
+
+Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death that
+waited down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her again, put
+away her detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went to the door.
+
+"Good-bye, Harmony," he said steadily. "Always in my heart!"
+
+Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America, with
+the recording angel opening a new page in life's ledger for her and
+a red-ink line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his daddy wandering
+through the heaven of friendly adventure and green fields, hand in hand;
+with the carrier resting after its labors in the pigeon house by the
+rose-fields of Sofia; with the sentry casting martial shadows through
+the barred windows of the hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to
+die, dividing his heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young
+girl.
+
+Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining into
+the salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter's open trunk and shabby
+wardrobe spread over chairs. An end of trunks and departure, as was the
+beginning.
+
+Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God's acre, whence little Jimmy had
+started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on the frost-covered
+grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle of the Donau. Harmony had
+taken her problem there, in the early hour before Monia would summon her
+to labor--took her problem and found her answer.
+
+The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too warmly
+clad, walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper against the
+cold. Already the air carried a hint of spring; there was a feeling of
+resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt alive under-foot.
+
+Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child had
+repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it, with some
+vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the little verse:--
+
+"Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes:
+And in the hereafter, angels may Roll the stone from its grave away."
+
+When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.
+
+There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great bunch
+of roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence they came. One
+of the pickaninnies had carried the box and stood impassively by, gazing
+at Harmony.
+
+Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered it, quite
+eclipsed Harmony's.
+
+"I come here every morning," she said simply.
+
+She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the city.
+Her quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked once into the
+woman's eyes. After that she knew. It was on the drive back, with the
+little darky on the box beside the driver, that Harmony got her answer.
+
+Le Grande put a hand over Harmony's.
+
+"I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him."
+
+"We loved him."
+
+"And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right--I was not a fit person
+to--to have him."
+
+"It was not that--not only that--"
+
+"Did he ever ask for me? But of course not."
+
+"No, he had no remembrance."
+
+Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.
+
+"I loved him very much when he came," said Le Grande, "although I did
+not want him. I had been told I could have a career on the stage. Ah,
+my dear, I chose the career--and look at me! What have I? A grave in
+the cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by a man I loathe! If I
+could live it over again!"
+
+The answer was very close now:--
+
+"Would you stay at home?"
+
+"Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the boy
+always. There is only one thing worth while--the love of a good man. I
+have lived, lived hard. And I know."
+
+"But supposing that one has real ability--I mean some achievement
+already, and a promise--"
+
+Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.
+
+"I see. You are a musician, I believe?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And--it is Dr. Byrne?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Le Grande bent forward earnestly.
+
+"My child," she said, "if one man in all the world looked at me as your
+doctor looks at you, I--I would be a better woman."
+
+"And my music?"
+
+"Play for your children, as you played for my little boy."
+
+Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting clean
+collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like negligible garments
+with great care and putting in his dresscoat in a roll. His pipes took
+time, and the wooden sentry he packed with great care and a bit of
+healthy emotion. Once or twice he came across trifles of Harmony's, and
+he put them carefully aside--the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief,
+a bow she had worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before
+and that reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get away
+if he is to keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon bow can
+bring that look of suffering into his eyes.
+
+The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot, any foot
+at all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.
+
+"Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen," he sang at the top of his
+voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the air. The
+antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in his bedroom.
+When the wildgame seller came over for coffee there would be a
+discussion probably. But were not the antlers of all deer similar?
+
+The Portier's wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her hand.
+
+"A cab," she announced, "with a devil's imp on the box. Perhaps it is
+that American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!"
+
+It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache. Harmony
+was at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week before or the
+undecided and troubled girl of before that. A radiant Harmony, this, who
+stood in the doorway, who wished them good-morning, and ran up the old
+staircase with glowing eyes and a heart that leaped and throbbed. A
+woman now, this Harmony, one who had looked on life and learned; one
+who had chosen her fate and was running to meet it; one who feared only
+death, not life or anything that life could offer.
+
+The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up--not dressed. What did
+that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?
+
+Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney's Point, had come across a bit
+of paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his open trunk,
+staring blindly at it:--
+
+"You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+"H. W."
+
+Quite the end now, with Harmony running across the room and dropping
+down on her knees among a riot of garments--down on her knees, with one
+arm round Peter's neck, drawing his tired head lower until she could
+kiss him.
+
+"Oh, Peter, Peter, dear!" she cried. "I'll love you all my life if only
+you'll love me, and never, never let me go!"
+
+Peter was dazed at first. He put his arms about her rather unsteadily,
+because he had given her up and had expected to go through the rest of
+life empty of arm and heart. And when one has one's arms set, as one may
+say, for loneliness and relinquishment it is rather difficult--Ah, but
+Peter got the way of it swiftly.
+
+"Always," he said incoherently; "forever the two of us. Whatever comes,
+Harmony?"
+
+"Whatever comes."
+
+"And you'll not be sorry?"
+
+"Not if you love me."
+
+Peter kissed her on the eyes very solemnly.
+
+"God helping me, I'll be good to you always. And I'll always love you."
+
+He tried to hold her away from him for a moment after that, to tell her
+what she was doing, what she was giving up. She would not be reasoned
+with.
+
+"I love you," was her answer to every line. And it was no divided
+allegiance she promised him. "Career? I shall have a career. Yours!"
+
+"And your music?"
+
+She colored, held him closer.
+
+"Some day," she whispered, "I shall tell you about that."
+
+Late winter morning in Vienna, with the school-children hurrying home,
+the Alserstrasse alive with humanity--soldiers and chimney-sweeps,
+housewives and beggars. Before the hospital the crowd lines up along the
+curb; the head waiter from the coffee-house across comes to the doorway
+and looks out. The sentry in front of the hospital ceases pacing and
+stands at attention.
+
+In the street a small procession comes at the double quick--a handful of
+troopers, a black van with tiny, high-barred windows, more troopers.
+
+Inside the van a Bulgarian spy going out to death--a swarthy little man
+with black eyes and short, thick hands, going out like a gentleman and a
+soldier to meet the God of patriots and lovers.
+
+The sentry, who was only a soldier from Salzburg with one lung, was also
+a gentleman and a patriot. He uncovered his head.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1214.txt or 1214.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/1/1214/
+
+Produced by Michael Delaney
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/1214.zip b/old/1214.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c4c0a76
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1214.zip
diff --git a/old/old/sstrs10.txt b/old/old/sstrs10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a615df5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/sstrs10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10323 @@
+Project Gutenberg Etext of The Street of Seven Stars by Rinehart
+#2 in our series by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The Street of Seven Stars
+
+by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+February, 1998  [Etext #1214]
+[Date last updated: June 9, 2006]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of The Street of Seven Stars by Rinehart
+******This file should be named sstrs10.txt or sstrs10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, sstrs11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, sstrs10a.txt
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
+in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
+files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1998 for a total of 1500+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 150 billion Etexts given away.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
+should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
+will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was prepared by Michael Delaney of Laurel, MD.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
+BY
+MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have
+been a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a
+royal game preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria
+Theresa had used the building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly
+there was something royal in the proportions of the salon. With
+all the candles lighted in the great glass chandelier, and no
+sidelights, so that the broken paneling was mercifully obscured
+by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great empress herself
+had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to anecdotes
+of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
+related not a few herself.
+
+The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night.
+Outside in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind,
+and the heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano
+student named Scatchett and dubbed "Scatch"--the gate slammed to
+and fro monotonously, giving now and then just enough pause for a
+hope that it had latched itself, a hope that was always destroyed
+by the next gust.
+
+One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the
+purpose of enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a
+Tschaikowsky concerto, it had been moved to the small center
+table, and had served to give light if not festivity to the
+afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a gnarled and stubby
+fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of the
+recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a
+crumpled napkin or two,--there were never enough to go
+round,--and on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly
+abandoned for the things of the flesh.
+
+The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with
+the slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to
+a draft under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the
+uneven old floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had
+been huddled near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it
+up.  There was no impatience, however, in the way she handled the
+loose sheets. She put them together carefully, almost tenderly,
+and placed them on the top of the grand piano, anchoring them
+against the draft with a china dog from the stand.
+
+The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows,
+half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand
+piano. There were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into
+dim corners and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great
+chandelier looked like stalactites in a cave. The girl touched
+the piano keys; they were ice under her fingers.
+
+In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the
+chandelier, and armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the
+unheard-of extravagance of lighting it, not here and there, but
+throughout as high as she could reach, standing perilously on her
+tiptoes on the chair.
+
+The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed
+that the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying;
+it revealed the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove
+almost so; it let the initiated into the secret that the blackish
+fluid in the cups had been made with coffee extract that had been
+made of Heaven knows what; and it revealed in the cavernous
+corner near the door a number of trunks. The girl, having lighted
+all the candles, stood on the chair and looked at the trunks. She
+was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A door slammed down
+the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into one of
+those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
+rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
+
+The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony
+Wells, a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite
+"Arlesienne" will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of
+the Waldweben from "Siegfried" will keep us awake at night.
+Harmony had lain awake more than once over some crime against her
+namesake, had paid penances of early rising and two hours of
+scales before breakfast, working with stiffened fingers in her
+cold little room where there was no room for a stove, and sitting
+on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once pink
+butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee,
+rolls, and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett
+at the piano in the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater
+and fingerless gloves and holding a hot-water bottle on her
+knees. Three rooms beyond, down the stone hall, the Big Soprano,
+doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped to make an
+encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might
+practice peacefully.
+
+Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at
+dawn from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his 
+door and listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning
+after morning he shook his fist up the stone staircase.
+
+"Gott im Himmel!" he would say to his wife, fumbling with the
+knot of his mustache bandage, "what a people, these Americans! So 
+much noise and no music!"
+
+"And mad!" grumbled his wife. "All the day coal, coal to heat;
+and at night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it."
+
+And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was
+going back to her church, grand opera having found no place for
+her. Scatch was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed,
+of music, but her head much occupied with the trousseau in her
+trunks. The Harmar sisters had gone two weeks before, their funds
+having given out. Indeed, funds were very low with all of them.
+The "Bitte zum speisen" of the little German maid often called
+them to nothing more opulent than a stew of beef and carrots.
+
+Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera
+tickets, and never was butter better spent. And there had been
+gala days--a fruitcake from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at
+Christmas, and once or twice on birthdays real American ice cream
+at a fabulous price and worth it. Harmony had bought a suit, too,
+a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and a willow plume that
+would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh, yes, gala days,
+indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and the
+faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all
+had always, the old tragedy of the American music student
+abroad--the expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the
+Master himself, the contention against German greed or Austrian
+whim. And always back in one's mind the home people, to whom one
+dares not confess that after nine months of waiting, or a year,
+one has seen the Master once or not at all.
+
+Or--and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
+soul--to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
+undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often.
+Harmony stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big
+Soprano was calling down the hall.
+
+"Scatch," she was shouting briskly, "where is my hairbrush?"
+
+A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
+
+"I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't
+you got a comb?"
+
+"As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the
+teeth are out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look
+under the bed."
+
+Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
+
+"Here it is," she called joyously. "And here are Harmony's
+bedroom slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!"  The girl
+got down off the chair and went to the door.
+
+"Thanks, dear," she said. "I'm coming in a minute."
+
+She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria
+Theresa, and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if
+she opened the window the air would brighten them.
+
+Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big
+Soprano's room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the
+door. She held her shabby wrapper about her and listened just
+inside the door. There were no footsteps, only the banging of the
+gate in the wind. She turned to the Big Soprano, heating a
+curling iron in the flame of a candle, and held out her hand.
+
+"Look!" she said. "Under my bed! Ten kronen!"
+
+Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and
+ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected
+the dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a
+cigarette, on which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the
+cigarette in the candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.
+
+"The first for a week," she said. "Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch;
+there may be another relic of my prosperous days."
+
+But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes
+with a government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the
+ten-kronen piece.
+
+"Where is the other?" she asked in a whisper.
+
+"In my powder-box."
+
+Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny
+gold-piece.
+
+"Every little bit," she said flippantly, but still in a whisper,
+"added to what she's got, makes just a little bit more."
+
+"Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds
+it, it's good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get
+together, without losing it now. I'll have to jump overboard and
+swim ashore at New York--I haven't even a dollar for tips."
+
+"New York!" said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. "If
+Henry meets me I know he will--"
+
+"Tut!" The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down.
+"You and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your
+maudlin young mind that money isn't the only thing Harmony is
+going to need? She's going to be alone--and this is a bad town to
+be alone in. And she is not like us. You have your Henry. I'm a
+beefy person who has a stomach, and I'm thankful for it. But she
+is different--she's got the thing that you are as well without,
+the thing that my lack of is sending me back to fight in a church
+choir instead of grand opera."
+
+Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
+
+"Temperament?" she asked. It had always been accepted in the
+little colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their
+lesser firmament.
+
+The Big Soprano sniffed.
+
+"If you like," she said. "Soul is a better word. Only the rich
+ought to have souls, Scatchy, dear."
+
+This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was
+coming down the hall.
+
+"I thought, under her pillow," she whispered. "She'll find it--"
+
+Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the
+flame of a candle.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when,
+having seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she
+had come back alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse.
+The trunks were gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on
+the piano, where little Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New
+York with Henry's arms about her, had forgotten it. The candles
+in the great chandelier had died in tears of paraffin that
+spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets were still
+smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the room.
+
+Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an
+uneasy sense of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning
+trees and slamming gate and the great dark house in the
+background, was a forbidding place at best. She had rung the bell
+and had stood, her back against the door, eyes and ears strained
+in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure had stopped
+outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment the
+gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind
+her.
+
+The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and
+his mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather
+augmented when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in
+spite of the early morning practicing; she looked like a singer
+at the opera for whom he cherished a hidden attachment. The
+singer had never seen him, but it was for her he wore the
+mustache bandage. Perhaps some day--hopefully! One must be ready!
+
+The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his
+tip, the five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and
+Rosa was a niece of his wife and talked more than she should. He
+refused the tip with a gesture.
+
+"Bitte, Fraulein!" he said through the bandage. "It is for me a
+pleasure to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a
+basin of soup."
+
+The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open
+over his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor.
+But to Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to
+speak and could not but she held out her hand in impulsive
+gratitude, and the Portier in his best manner bent over and
+kissed it. As she reached the curve of the stone staircase,
+carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her with his
+eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
+
+The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were
+comforting to Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened
+salon she peered out into the garden again, but no skulking
+figure detached itself from the shadows, and the gate remained,
+for a marvel, closed.
+
+It was when--having picked up her violin in a very passion of
+loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar
+sounds echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms--it was
+when she was ready for bed that she found the money under her
+pillow, and a scrawl from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic
+scrawl, little Scatchett having adored her from afar, as the
+plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the gifted:--
+
+DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to
+blots]: I am honestly frightened when I think what we are doing.
+But, oh, my dear, if you could know how pleased we are with
+ourselves you'd not deny us this pleasure. Harry, you have
+it--the real thing, you know, whatever it is--and I haven't. None
+of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go now, just when
+lessons would mean everything--well, you must not think of it. We
+have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or at
+least--well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by
+being careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but
+it may help. Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and
+it may be yours anyhow.
+
+"Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things
+about our leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You
+are so beautiful, Harry,--although you never let us tell you so.
+And Sadie says you have a soul and I haven't, and that souls are
+deadly things to have. I feel to-night that in urging you to stay
+I am taking the burden of your soul on me! Do be careful, Harry.
+If any one you do not know speaks to you call a policeman. And be
+sure you get into a respectable pension. There are queer ones.
+
+"Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from
+home--you said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?--and
+will keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything
+should go wrong--. But perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any
+case, of course it's a loan, and you can preserve that
+magnificent independence of yours by sending it back when you get
+to work to make your fortune. And if you are doubtful at all,
+just remember that hopeful little mother of yours who sent you
+over to get what she had never been able to have for herself, and
+who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and she
+named you Harmony.
+
+"I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.
+
+SCATCH."
+
+That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their
+crimson feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the
+salon shook in the draft as if the old Austrian court still
+danced beneath, Harmony fought her battle. And a battle it was.
+Scatchy and the Big Soprano had not known everything. There had
+been no insurance on her father's life; the little mother was
+penniless. A married sister would care for her, but what then?
+Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to take her
+home, and she had--the hoard under the pillow. To go back and
+teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be
+presented, as he had promised her, at a special concert in
+Vienna, with all the prestige at home that that would mean, and
+its resulting possibility of fame and fortune--which?
+
+She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she
+could teach English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some
+of the stores advertised "English Spoken." That would be
+something to fall back on, a clerkship during the day.
+
+Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went
+into the Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile
+stove was warm and comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay
+a disreputable comb with most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed
+this unromantic object! Which reveals the fact that, genius or
+not, she was only a young and rather frightened girl, and that
+every atom of her ached with loneliness.
+
+She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her
+feet under her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier,
+crawling out into the cold from under his feathers, opened the
+door into the hall and listened. She was playing, not practicing,
+and the music was the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann.
+Standing in the doorway in his night attire, his chest open to
+the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor above, he
+hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
+
+When the music had died away he went in and closed the door
+sheepishly. His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in
+her hand. She eyed him.
+
+"So! It is the American Fraulein now!"
+
+"I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music."
+He fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind,
+keeping one eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to
+untie it for him.
+
+"She leaves to-day," she announced, ignoring the knot.
+
+"Why? She is alone. Rosa says--"
+
+"She leaves to-day!"
+
+The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth
+compactness. The Portier jerked at it.
+
+"No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what
+saw I last night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up
+the stair after her! A man in the gateway!"
+
+The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage,
+which had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great
+knife.
+
+"She will stay if she so desire," he muttered furiously, and,
+raising the knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache,
+faintly gray and sweetly up-curled, stood revealed.
+
+"She will stay!" he repeated. "And when you see men at the gate,
+let me know. She is an angel!"
+
+"And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?"
+
+This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come
+from telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in
+one's heart. Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and
+to-day--Himmel, the girl must go!
+
+Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and
+expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere
+a tiny room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It
+is folly to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her
+playing would not annoy people, that was important.
+
+She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that
+purpose. Rosa wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for
+her keep, because it was not the custom for young ladies to be
+alone in the city--young girls of the people, of course; but
+beautiful young ladies, no!
+
+Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude,
+but she could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk,
+she went down to interview the Portier and his wife, who were
+agents under the owner for the old house.
+
+The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He
+looked past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that
+the lease was up and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight
+she was not so like the angel, and after all she could only play
+the violin. The angel had a voice, such a voice! And besides,
+there was an eye at the crack of the door.
+
+The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a
+heavy heart that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper
+quarters.
+
+Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
+cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the
+gutters were frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in
+the mountains the day before and hanging from a hook before a
+wild-game shop, was frozen quite stiff. It was a pretty creature.
+The girl turned her eyes away. A young man, buying cheese and
+tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.
+
+"That's an American girl, isn't it?" he asked in American-German.
+
+The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him,
+and Rosa talked. When the American left the shop he knew
+everything of Harmony that Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called
+her "The Beautiful One." Also he was short one krone four beliers
+in his change, which is readily done when a customer is plainly
+thinking of a "beautiful one."
+
+Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a
+stove and no objection to practicing. There were plenty--but the
+rates! The willow plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of
+making the plainest garments appear costly. Landladies looked at
+the plume and the suit and heard the soft swish of silk beneath,
+which marks only self-respect in the American woman but is
+extravagance in Europe, and added to their regular terms until
+poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then at last toward
+evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the corner
+of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing,
+and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears
+for earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.
+
+A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in
+the center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye
+appear higher than the other and twisted one's nose. But there
+was an odor of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was
+the odor of many previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets
+and stale tobacco. Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather
+faint.
+
+She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative
+purity of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She
+reeled once or twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood
+for a moment with her eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man
+who had just come in with a cheese and some tinned fish under his
+arm.
+
+He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.
+
+"Not ill, are you?" he asked in English, and then remembering.
+"Bist du krank?" He colored violently at that, recalling too late
+the familiarity of the "du."
+
+Harmony smiled faintly.
+
+"Only tired," she said in English. "And the odor of cabbage--".
+
+Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting
+hand. He whistled softly. He had recognized her.
+
+"Cabbage, of course!" he said. "The pension upstairs is full of
+it. I live there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served
+up with pork."
+
+"I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?"
+
+He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.
+
+"So bad," he observed, "that I keep body and soul together by
+buying strong and odorous food at the delicatessens--odorous,
+because only rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there.
+Cheese is the only thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and
+once or twice even cheese has retired defeated."
+
+"But I don't like cheese." In sheer relief from the loneliness of
+the day her spirits were rising.
+
+"Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the
+corner. I say--" He hesitated.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Would you--don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a
+bit?"
+
+"It sounds attractive,"--uncertainly.
+
+"Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?"
+
+Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see
+this brisk young American--young, she knew by his voice, tall by
+his silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could
+not see his face, but she liked his voice.
+
+"Do you mean--with you?"
+
+"I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription."
+
+That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
+legitimate friends in need.
+
+"I am sure it is not proper, but--"
+
+"Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for
+professional services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced
+to-night by the landlady? Come now--to the coffee-house and the
+Paris edition of the 'Herald'!" But the next moment he paused and
+ran his hand over his chin. "I'm pretty disreputable," he
+explained. "I have been in a clinic all day, and, hang it all,
+I'm not shaved."
+
+"What difference does that make?"
+
+"My dear young lady," he explained gravely, picking up the cheese
+and the tinned fish, "it makes a difference in me that I wish you
+to realize before you see me in a strong light."
+
+He rapped at the Portier's door, with the intention of leaving
+his parcels there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his
+arm. A moment later Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a
+bit excited, and lovely with the color the adventure brought into
+her face. Her companion walked beside her, tall, slightly
+stooped. She essayed a fugitive little sideglance up at him, and
+meeting his eyes hastily averted hers.
+
+They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the
+girl's mind little Scatchett's letter.
+
+"Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you,
+call a policeman."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were
+gathered miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly
+men--uniformed officers, who made of the neighborhood
+coffee-house a sort of club, where under their breath they
+criticized the Government and retailed small regimental gossip;
+professors from the university, still wearing under the beards of
+middle life the fine horizontal scars of student days; elderly
+doctors from the general hospital across the street; even a
+Hofrath or two, drinking beer and reading the "Fliegende
+Blaetter" and "Simplicissimus"; and in an alcove round a billiard
+table a group of noisy Korps students. Over all a permeating odor
+of coffee, strong black coffee, made with a fig or two to give it
+color. It rose even above the blue tobacco haze and dominated the
+atmosphere with its spicy and stimulating richness. A bustle of
+waiters, a hum of conversation, the rattle of newspapers and the
+click of billiard balls--this was the coffee-house.
+
+Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony
+had been a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American
+integrity, in spite of the salon of Maria Theresa and three
+expensive lessons a week in German. Harmony knew the art
+galleries and the churches, which were free, and the opera,
+thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone of Austrian
+life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.
+
+Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and
+disappeared for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of
+the "Herald." The girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the
+bright electric lights, he was not handsome, hardly good-looking.
+His mouth was wide, his nose irregular, his hair a nondescript
+brown,--but the mouth had humor, the nose character, and, thank
+Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that Harmony saw all this
+at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables, with a nod
+here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect--a tall
+man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall
+men are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!
+
+The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the
+points of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak
+to him. The shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly
+the revelation was an easement to the girl's nervousness. This
+smiling and unpressed individual, blithely waving aloft the Paris
+edition of the "Herald" and equally blithely ignoring the
+maledictions of the student from whom he had taken it--even
+Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or threatened him
+with the police.
+
+He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to
+interfere with her outlook over the room.
+
+"Warmer?" he asked.
+
+"Very much."
+
+"Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They
+know me here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest
+cakes for me. Don't let me bother you; go on and read. See which
+of the smart set is getting a divorce--or is it always the same
+one? And who's President back home."
+
+"I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?"
+
+"Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take
+back to America with me--one coffee-house, one dozen military men
+for local color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's
+wife to sit in the cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll
+grow wealthy."
+
+"But what about the medical practice?"
+
+He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the
+humorous promise of his mouth.
+
+"Why, it will work out perfectly," he said whimsically. "The
+great American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee
+until the feeble American nervous system will be shattered. I
+shall have an office across the street!"
+
+After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade
+conversation until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes,
+too, and he watched her with comfortable satisfaction.
+
+"Nod your head but don't speak," he said. "Remember, I am
+prescribing, and there's to be no conversation until the coffee
+is down. Shall I or shall I not open the cheese?"
+
+But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something
+inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an
+occasional swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits
+of news from the paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast
+an eye over the crowded room. Here and there an officer, gazing
+with too open admiration on Harmony's lovely face, found himself
+fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes that were anything but
+humorous at that instant, and thought best to shift his gaze.
+
+The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But
+the unknown protested.
+
+"The function of a coffee-house," he explained gravely, "is
+twofold. Coffee is only the first half. The second half is
+conversation."
+
+"I converse very badly."
+
+"So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that
+well. Shall I commence?"
+
+Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why
+choke over conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It
+was warm there, with the heater at her back; better than the
+little room with the sagging bed and the doors covered with wall
+paper. Her feet had stopped aching, too, She could have sat there
+for hours. And--why evade it?--she was interested. This whimsical
+and respectful young man with his absurd talk and his shabby
+clothes had roused her curiosity.
+
+"Please," she assented.
+
+"Then, first of all, my name. I'm getting that over early,
+because it isn't much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don't
+shudder."
+
+"Certainly I'm not shuddering."
+
+"I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a
+German uncle of my mother's. Augustus! It's rather a mess. What
+shall I put on my professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus
+Byrne nobody's fooled. They know my wretched first name is
+Peter."
+
+"Or Patrick."
+
+"I rather like Patrick--if I thought it might pass as Patrick!
+Patrick has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that's not
+bad. But Peter!"
+
+"Do you know," Harmony confessed half shyly, "I like Peter as a
+name."
+
+"Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as
+Peter Byrne. The rest doesn't amount to much, but I want you to
+know it, since you have been good enough to accept me on faith.
+I'm here alone, from a little town in eastern Ohio; worked my way
+through a coeducational college in the West and escaped
+unmarried; did two years in a drygoods store until, by saving and
+working in my vacations, I got through medical college and tried
+general practice. Didn't like it--always wanted to do surgery. A
+little legacy from the German uncle, trying to atone for the
+'Augustus,' gave me enough money to come here. I've got a chance
+with the Days--surgeons, you know--when I go back, if I can hang
+on long enough. That's all. Here's a traveler's check with my
+name on it, to vouch for the truth of this thrilling narrative.
+Gaze on it with awe; there are only a few of them left!"
+
+Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as
+the strings of her own violin, and under the even lightness of
+his tone she felt many things that met a response in
+her--loneliness and struggle, and the ever-present anxiety about
+money, grim determination, hope and fear, and even occasional
+despair. He was still young, but there were lines in his face and
+a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less frank, she
+would have known soon enough--the dingy little pension, the
+shabby clothes--
+
+She held out her hand.
+
+"Thank you for telling me," she said simply. "I think I
+understand very well because--it's music with me: violin. And my
+friends have gone, so I am alone, too."
+
+He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd
+without seeing it.
+
+"It's curious, isn't it?" he said. "Here we are, you and I,
+meeting in the center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief,
+both working our heads off for an idea that may never pan out!
+Why aren't you at home to-night, eating a civilized beefsteak and
+running upstairs to get ready for a nice young man to bring you a
+box of chocolates? Why am I not measuring out calico in Shipley &
+West's? Instead, we are going to Frau Schwarz', to listen to cold
+ham and scorched compote eaten in six different languages."
+
+Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She
+was drawing on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the
+crowd.
+
+Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then,
+seeing Byrne, he waved a greeting to him. Byrne's eyes, from
+being introspective, became watchful.
+
+The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with
+black hair and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He
+was not alone. A slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic,
+rose when he did and threw away the end of a cigarette.
+
+"Why do we go so soon?" she demanded fretfully in German. "It is
+early still."
+
+He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and
+eminently satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke
+the other's language.
+
+"Because, my beloved," he said lightly, "you are smoking a great
+many poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to
+speak to Peter."
+
+The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.
+
+"Who is that with Peter?"
+
+"We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a
+woman at last!"
+
+The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with
+a slow and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed
+him, and paused to apologize, to the officer's delight and  her
+escort's irritation. And Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line
+of annoyance between his brows. The girl was ahead; that
+complicated things.
+
+When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily,
+with a word of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done.
+He had taken the little Austrian's arm and led her by the table
+while he was still greeting her. He held her in conversation in
+his absurd German until they had reached the swinging doors,
+while her companion followed helplessly. And he bowed her out,
+protesting his undying admiration for her eyes, while the florid
+youth alternately raged behind him and stared back at Harmony,
+interested and unconscious behind her table.
+
+The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned,
+unsmiling, to the other man.
+
+"That won't do, you know, Stewart," he said, grave but not
+unfriendly.
+
+"The Kid wouldn't bite her."
+
+"We'll not argue about it."
+
+After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.
+
+"Certainly not," he agreed cheerfully. "That is up to you, of
+course. I didn't know. We're looking for you to-night."   
+
+A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne,
+but the situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.
+
+"I'll be round," he said. "I have a lecture and I may be late,
+but I'll come."
+
+The "Kid" was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in
+air, angrily flushed.
+
+"You saw!" she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped
+a hand through her arm. "He protects her from me! It is because
+of you. Before I knew you--"
+
+"Before you knew me, little one," he said cheerfully, "you were
+exactly what you are now."
+
+She paused on the curb and raised her voice.
+
+"So! And what is that?"
+
+"Beautiful as the stars, only--not so remote."
+
+In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for
+subtlety. The "beautiful" calmed her, but the second part of the
+sentence roused her suspicion.
+
+"Remote? What is that?"
+
+"I was thinking of Worthington."
+
+The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.
+
+In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of
+soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the
+pavement and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and
+German epithets. He drew his chin into the up-turned collar of
+his overcoat and waited, an absurdly patient figure, until the
+hail of consonants had subsided into a rain of tears. Then he
+took the girl's elbow again and led her, childishly weeping, into
+a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and eyes of the
+Alserstrasse.
+
+Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl
+was closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not
+his, or of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely,
+alluring, rather puzzled at this moment, was also a situation.
+For there was a situation. He had suspected it that morning,
+listening to the delicatessen-seller's narrative of Rosa's
+account of the disrupted colony across in the old lodge; he had
+been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the dark
+entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
+light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her
+beauty, the emotional coming and going of her color, her frank
+loneliness, and God save the mark!--her trust in him, he accepted
+the situation and adopted it: his responsibility, if you please.
+
+He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly
+well--enough to love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had
+seen its tragedies and passed them by, or had, in his haphazard
+way, thrown a greeting to them, or even a glass of native wine.
+And he knew the musical temperament; the all or nothing of its
+insistent demands; its heights that are higher than others, its
+wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt Theater, where
+he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had known in
+Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking her
+own meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater
+she had worn a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.
+
+Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its
+years of coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's
+new resolution that night: this poverty adopting poverty, this
+youth adopting youth, with the altruistic purpose of saving it
+from itself.
+
+And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story
+or knew her name, Rosa having called her "The Beautiful One" in
+her narrative, and the delicatessen-seller being literal in his
+repetition.
+
+Back to "The Beautiful One" went Peter Byrne, and, true to his
+new part of protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and
+tried to look much older than he really was, and responsible. The
+result was a grimness that alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten
+proprieties.
+
+"I think I must go," she said hurriedly, after a glance at his
+determinedly altruistic profile. "I must finish packing my
+things. The Portier has promised--"
+
+"Go! Why, you haven't even told me your name!"
+
+"Frau Schwarz will present you to-night," primly and rising.
+
+Peter Byrne rose, too.
+
+"I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely
+yard alone after dark."
+
+"Yard! How do you know that?"
+
+Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set
+on the heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of
+dissolution. It took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally
+furnished an inspiration. He indicated it airily.
+
+"Saw you this morning coming out--delicatessen shop across the
+street," he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty
+which the girl's eyes seemed somehow to compel: "That's true, but
+it's not all the truth. I was on the bus last night, and when you
+got off alone I--I saw you were an American, and that's not a
+good neighborhood. I took the liberty of following you to your
+gate!"
+
+He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and
+said so. And in her gratitude she made no objection to his
+suggestion that he see her safely to the old lodge and help her
+carry her hand-luggage and her violin to the pension. He paid the
+trifling score, and followed by many eyes in the room they went
+out into the crisp night together.
+
+At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of
+scrubbing showed that the Portier's wife was preparing for the
+inspection of possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the
+stairs by the light of a candle, and the steam of the hot water
+on the cold marble invested her like an aura. She stood aside to
+let them pass, and then went cumbrously down the stairs to where,
+a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other, the Portier was
+frying chops for the evening meal.
+
+"What have I said?" she demanded from the doorway. "Your angel is
+here."
+
+"So!"
+
+"She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you
+refuse, because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is
+again here, and with a man!"
+
+"It is the way of the young and beautiful--there is always a
+man," said the Portier, turning a chop.
+
+His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away,
+exasperated.
+
+"It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate," she threw
+back over her shoulder. "I knew it from the first; but you, great
+booby, can see nothing but red lips. Bah!"
+
+Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and
+freezing cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter
+Byrne sat and waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the
+Street of Seven Stars, the arc lights swung in the wind.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz,
+much crimped and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head
+of the long table. There were few, almost no Americans, the
+Americans flocking to good food at reckless prices in more
+fashionable pensions; to the Frau Gallitzenstein's, for instance,
+in the Kochgasse, where there was to be had real beefsteak, where
+turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and where,
+were one so minded, one might revel in whipped cream.
+
+The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the
+center of the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with
+wire stems and green paper leaves, and over the side-table, with
+its luxury of compote in tall glass dishes and its wealth of
+small hard cakes, there hung a framed motto which said, "Nicht
+Rauchen," "No Smoking,"--and which looked suspiciously as if it
+had once adorned a compartment of a railroad train.
+
+Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a
+careful toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But
+he had gone further: He had discovered, for the first time in the
+three months of its defection, a button missing from his coat,
+and had set about to replace it. He had cut a button from another
+coat, by the easy method of amputating it with a surgical
+bistoury, and had sewed it in its new position with a curved
+surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized catgut. The
+operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with the
+aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he
+tied the ends in a surgeon's knot underneath and stood back to
+consider the result. It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous.
+After a moment or two of troubled thought he blacked the white
+catgut with a dot of ink and went on his way rejoicing.
+
+Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the
+course he had laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive
+line of thought as he dressed. When he was not smoking he was
+whistling, and when he was doing neither, and the needle proved
+refractory in his cold fingers, he was swearing to himself. For
+there was no fire in the room. The materials for a fire were
+there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an obelisk in a
+cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive, and
+hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open--one
+window, to be exact, the room being very small--and spends most
+of the day in a warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.
+
+To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except
+subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step
+by step, the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon,
+weighing, considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached
+as he brushed back his hair and put away his sewing implements,
+was somewhat to the effect that he could have done a better piece
+of work with his eyes shut and his hands tied behind his back;
+and that if it were not for the wealth of material to work on
+he'd pack up and go home. Which brought him back to Harmony and
+his new responsibility. He took off the necktie he had absently
+put on and hunted out a better one.
+
+He was late at supper--an offense that brought a scowl from the
+head of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile.
+Harmony was already in her place. Seated between a little
+Bulgarian and a Jewish student from Galicia, she was almost
+immediately struggling in a sea of language, into which she
+struck out now and then tentatively, only to be again submerged.
+Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly, aware of the
+sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did not
+understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and
+failing that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of
+the day. Her bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and
+rather aloof. She ate almost nothing, and left the table before
+the others had finished.
+
+What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing
+eyes! What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with
+dessert! What heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted
+eyes, looking away from appealing ones; lips that tremble with
+wretchedness nibbling daintily at a morsel; smiles that sear;
+foolish bits of talk that mean nothing except to one, and to that
+one everything! Harmony, freezing at Peter's formal bow and
+gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the meal, or no
+nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering the
+little Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope
+of a glance. And over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the
+"Nicht Rauchen" sign, and an acrimonious discussion on eugenics
+between an American woman doctor named Gates and a German matron
+who had had fifteen children, and who reduced every general
+statement to a personal insult.
+
+Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed,
+and she was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one.
+Defiantly, too, had he only known it, her small chin up and her
+color high again; playing the "Humoresque," of all things, in the
+hope, of course, that he would hear it and guess from her choice
+the wild merriment of her mood. Peter rapped once or twice, but
+obtained no answer, save that the "Humoresque" rose a bit higher;
+and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he was forced to
+light a cigarette to cover his pausing.
+
+Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman
+of forty or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a
+masculine disregard of clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let
+him help her into her ulster.
+
+"New girl, eh?" she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door.
+"Very gay, isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that!
+Honestly, Peter, what are we going to do?"
+
+"Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better
+food, but not for our terms."
+
+Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put
+it on with a single jerk down over her hair.
+
+"Oh, darn money, anyhow!" she said. "Come and walk to the corner
+with me. I have a lecture."
+
+Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his
+room. There, on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he
+wrote--
+
+"Are you ill? Or have I done anything?"
+
+P. B."
+
+This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the
+little Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said
+nothing, nor did Peter, who rose and dusted his knees. The little
+Bulgarian spoke no English and little German. Between them was
+the wall of language. But higher than this barrier was the
+understanding of their common sex. He held out his hand, still
+smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took it. Then he
+followed the woman doctor down the stairs.
+
+To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be
+absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl
+attracts an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that
+he feared he had offended her, than he would have been without
+this fillip to his interest. But even his concern did not prevent
+his taking copious and intelligent notes at his lecture that
+night, or interfere with his enjoyment of the Stein of beer with
+which, after it was over, he washed down its involved German.
+
+The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not
+approve of Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but
+from a lack of fineness in the man himself--an intangible thing
+that seems to be a matter of that unfashionable essence, the
+soul, as against the clay; of the thing contained, by an inverse
+metonymy, for the container.
+
+Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they
+walked to Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the
+rapid exercise combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that,
+and the recollection that it was Saturday night and that
+to-morrow there would be no clinics, no lectures, no operations;
+that the great shambles would be closed down and that priests
+would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was whistling
+as he walked along.
+
+Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him,
+stopped under a street light to consult his watch.
+
+"Almost ten!" he said. "I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told
+Jennie I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart."
+
+"Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?"
+
+"Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make
+a good woman understand that sort of thing."
+
+"Thank God for that!"
+
+After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It
+was the "Humoresque."
+
+Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that
+hour was to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the
+bell. The lights were still on, however, in the hallways,
+revealing not overclean stairs and, for a wonder, an electric
+elevator. This, however, a card announced as out of order. Boyer
+stopped and examined the card grimly.
+
+"'Out of order'!" he observed. "Out of order since last spring,
+judging by that card. Vorwarts!"
+
+They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer
+played golf, as became the leading specialist of his county.
+Byrne, with a driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been
+obliged to forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a
+resulting muscular development that his slight stoop belied. He
+was as hard as nails, without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the
+long steep flights with an elasticity that left even Boyer a step
+or so behind.
+
+Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his
+coat replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was
+thick with smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of
+chips and the sound of beer mugs on wood.
+
+Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both
+men bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels
+together and bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.
+
+"What do I smell, Marie?" he demanded. "Surely not sausages!"
+
+Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an
+old friend. It was always sausages.
+
+"Sausages, of a truth--fat ones.'
+
+"But surely not with mustard?"
+
+"Ach, ja--englisch mustard."
+
+Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand
+on Byrne's arm.
+
+"I was very angry with you to-day."
+
+"With me?"
+
+Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's
+unconventional menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of
+addressing Marie in English, while she replied in her own tongue.
+
+"Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and
+you--She is rich, so?"
+
+"I really don't know. I think not."
+
+"And good?" 
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed,
+looking up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was
+not even hard. Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age
+and experience. She had put on a white dress, cut out at the
+neck, and above her collarbones were small, cuplike hollows. She
+was very thin.
+
+"I was sad to-night," she said plaintively. "I wished to jump out
+the window."
+
+Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.
+
+"And I made you feel like that?"
+
+"Not you--the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I--" She stopped
+tragically, then sniffled.
+
+"The sausages!" she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward
+the kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.
+
+Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work
+in Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and
+Austrians could teach what could not be taught at home, but
+because of the wealth of clinical material. The great European
+hospitals, filled to overflowing, offered unlimited choice of
+cases. The contempt for human life of overpopulated cities,
+coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness of the masses,
+combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies that
+others may live.
+
+Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of
+fineness which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his
+work, a sort of ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or
+bad, an overwhelming egotism that in his profession might only be
+a necessary self-reliance.
+
+His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence
+in Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the
+narrow means at his control he had the choice of two
+alternatives: To live, as Byrne was living, in a third-class
+pension, stewing in summer, freezing in winter, starving always;
+or the alternative he had chosen.
+
+The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that
+luxury of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense
+of water on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all
+that, where with premeditation and forethought one might bathe.
+The room had once been a fuel and store room, but now boasted a
+tin tub and a stove with a reservoir on top, where water might be
+heated to the boiling point, at the same time bringing  up the
+atmosphere to a point where the tin tub sizzled if one touched
+it.
+
+Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a
+bedroom; the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a
+clothespress, which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill.
+And beyond that again, opening through an arch with a dingy
+chenille curtain, the sitting-room, now in chaotic disorder.
+
+Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men
+already there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace
+Hunter, doing research work at the general hospital, and a young
+piano student from Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been
+already dealt, and Byrne stood by waiting for the hand to be
+played.
+
+The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority.
+It was a regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the
+beer that sat in Steins on the floor beside each man, or as
+Marie's boiled Wiener sausages.
+
+The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers.
+MacLean, who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in
+chips with quick gestures of his long pianist's fingers.
+
+Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out,
+and so, after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and
+fell to betting. Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe,
+and after a second's hesitation Byrne turned to him.
+
+"I don't know just what to say, Stewart," he began in an
+undertone. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt Marie, but--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right." Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward
+to watch the game with an air of ending the discussion.
+
+"Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been
+kind to me, and I like her. You know that."
+
+"Don't be an ass!" Stewart turned on him sharply. "Marie is a
+little fool, that's all. I didn't know it was an American girl."
+
+Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He
+stayed out of the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about
+the room. He glanced into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where
+Marie hovered over the stove.
+
+She turned and saw him.
+
+"Come," she called. "Watch the supper for me while I go down for
+more beer."
+
+"But no," he replied, imitating her tone. "Watch the supper for
+me while I go down for more beer."
+
+"I love thee," she called merrily. "Tell the Herr Doktor I love
+thee. And here is the pitcher."
+
+When he returned the supper was already laid in the little
+kitchen. The cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace
+Hunter were replacing the cover and the lamp on the card-table.
+Stewart was orating from a pinnacle of proprietorship.
+
+"Exactly," he was saying, in reply to something gone before; "I
+used to come here Saturday nights--used to come early and take a
+bath. Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit
+in a corner and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp
+there, and decent food, and a bed that didn't suffer from
+necrosis in the center. Then when he was called home I took it."
+
+"Girl and all, wasn't it?"
+
+"Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she
+is. He came back last fall on his wedding trip--he married a
+wealthy girl and came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here.
+There was the deuce to pay."
+
+He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.
+
+"Jealous, eh?" from Hunter.
+
+"Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him--said he
+didn't respect her!"
+
+"It's a curious code of honor," said Boyer thoughtfully. And
+indeed to none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl
+of the streets, driven by God knows what necessity to make her
+own code and, having made it, living up to it with every fiber of
+her.
+
+"Bitte zum speisen!" called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and
+the men trooped out to the kitchen.
+
+The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in
+the center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and
+above all sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer,
+as did the others, and sang German songs with a frightful accent
+and much vigor and sentiment, as also did the others.
+
+Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and
+told himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like
+a prince for the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the
+hollow center of his bed, where his big figure fitted as
+comfortably as though it lay in a washtub, and before his eyes
+there came a vision of Stewart's flat and the slippers by the
+fire--which was eminently human.
+
+However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with
+considerable vigor, that he'd be damned if he would--which was
+eminently Peter Byrne. Almost immediately, with the bed
+coverings, augmented by his overcoat, drawn snug to his chin, and
+the better necktie swinging from the gasjet in the air from the
+opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours he had entirely
+forgotten Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the
+little Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a
+shawl over her shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire,
+while in the dining-room the little chambermaid cut butter and
+divided it sparingly among a dozen breakfast trays--on each tray
+two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate, a cup. On two trays Olga,
+with a glance over her shoulder, placed two butter pats. The
+mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a keen eye for
+butter--and a hard heart.
+
+Katrina came to the door.
+
+"The hot water is ready," she announced. "And the coffee also.
+Hast thou been to mass?"
+
+"Ja."
+
+"That is a lie." This quite on general principle, it being one of
+the cook's small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her
+underling, and one of Olga's Sunday morning's indulgences to
+oversleep and avoid the mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and
+without reply, being occupied at that moment in standing between
+Katrina and the extra pats of butter.
+
+"For the lie," said Katrina calmly, "thou shalt have no butter
+this morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it,
+wicked one!"
+
+Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.
+
+"The new Fraulein is American?"
+
+"Ja."
+
+Katrina shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Then I shall put more water to heat," she said resignedly. "The
+Americans use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!"
+
+Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood
+with it poised in her thin young arms.
+
+"The new Fraulein is very beautiful," she continued aloud.
+"Thinkest thou it is the hot water?"
+
+"Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?" demanded Katrina.
+"Go, and be less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who
+rings, but the new American."
+
+Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony's door, and being bidden,
+entered. The room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her
+nightgown, was closing the outer casement. The inner still swung
+open. Olga, having put down her pitcher, shivered.
+
+"Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?"
+
+"Always with open windows." Harmony having secured the inner
+casement, was wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the
+faded butterflies. Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh.
+She shook her head.
+
+"But the air of the night," she said, "it is full of mists and
+illnesses! Will you have breakfast now?"
+
+"In ten minutes, after I have bathed."
+
+Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen,
+shaking her head.
+
+"They are strange, the Americans!" she said to latrine. "And if
+to be lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows--"
+
+Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had
+passed with the reading of his note, and the sensation of his
+protection and nearness had been almost physical. In the virginal
+little apartment in the lodge of Maria Theresa the only masculine
+presence had been that of the Portier, carrying up coals at
+ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the accompanist who each alternate
+day had played for the Big Soprano to practice. And they had felt
+no deprivation, except for those occasional times when Scatchy
+developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a dancing-hall
+or one of the little theaters that opened after the opera.
+
+But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman
+or disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown
+herself on the protection of this shabby big American whom she
+had met but once, and, having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of
+course, that she realized her dependence. She had felt very old
+and experienced and exceedingly courageous as she put out her
+light the night before and took a flying leap into the bed. She
+was still old and experienced, if a trifle less courageous, that
+Sunday morning.
+
+Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls,
+two pats of butter--shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina
+the thrifty--and a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper
+torn from a notebook:--
+
+"Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company.
+Will you walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to
+ask you, but am spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one
+remaining American suit is being pressed.
+
+"P. B."
+
+Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:--
+
+"You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+"H. W."
+
+When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway
+told Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her
+violin. The idea of work obsessed her. To-morrow there would be
+the hunt for something to do to supplement her resources, this
+afternoon she had rashly promised to walk. The morning, then,
+must be given up to work. But after all she did little.
+
+For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused
+outside her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter
+Byrne, listening while he sorted lecture memoranda at his little
+table in bathrobe and slippers, absently filed the little note
+with the others--where he came across it months later--next to a
+lecture on McBurney's Point, and spent a sad hour or so over it.
+Over all the sordid little pension, with its odors of food and
+stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial flowers, the
+music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.
+
+In her room across from Harmony's, Anna Gates was sewing, or
+preparing to sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the
+room in violent disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting
+savagely at a roll of pink flannel. Because she was working with
+curved surgeon's scissors, borrowed from Peter, the cut edges
+were strangely scalloped. Her method as well as her tools was
+unique. Clearly she was intent on a body garment, for now and
+then she picked up the flannel and held it to her. Having thus,
+as one may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to cut
+again, jaw tight set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a
+small replica of Peter Byrne sewing a button on his coat.
+
+After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong.
+She rolled up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner,
+and proceeded to her Sunday morning occupation of putting away
+the garments she had worn during the week, a vast and motley
+collection.
+
+On the irritability of her mood Harmony's music had a late but
+certain effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than
+usual, seeing that she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly
+picked up the bundle from the corner. She hunted about for a
+thimble, being certain she had brought one from home a year
+before, but failed to find it. And finally, bundle under her arm
+and smiling, she knocked at Harmony's door.
+
+"Would you mind letting me sit with you?" she asked. "I'll not
+stir. I want to sew, and my room is such a mess!"
+
+Harmony threw the door wide. "You will make me very happy, if
+only my practicing does not disturb you."
+
+Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.
+
+"I'll probably be the disturbing element," she said. "I'm a noisy
+sewer."
+
+Harmony's immaculate room and radiant person put her in good
+humor immediately. She borrowed a thimble--not because she cared
+whether she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a
+part of the game--and settled herself in a corner, her ragged
+pieces in her lap. For an hour she plodded along and Harmony
+played. Then the girl put down her bow and turned to the corner.
+The little doctor was jerking at a knot in her thread.
+
+"It's in the most damnable knot!" she said, and Harmony was
+suddenly aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.
+
+"Please don't pay any attention to me," she implored. "I hate to
+sew. That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm
+a fool about music."
+
+"Perhaps, if you hate to sew--"
+
+"I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I
+hate being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German
+cooking and clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor
+as a church-mouse and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had
+any children!"
+
+Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the
+next moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the
+flannel and was smiling up through her glasses.
+
+"The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say
+I'm really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The
+food's bad and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a
+room and do my own cooking, but what time have I?" She spread out
+the pieces of flannel on her knee. "Does this look like anything
+to you?"
+
+"A petticoat, isn't it?"
+
+"I didn't intend it as a petticoat."
+
+"I thought, on account of the scallops--"
+
+"Scallops!" Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and
+from them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous
+mirth.
+
+"Scallops!" she gasped at last. "Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me
+cutting 'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!"
+
+Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately
+flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using
+little adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of
+talk led to Peter--Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's
+refusing to have his hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of
+the guards, and the duel Peter almost fought. It developed that
+Peter, as the challenged, had had the choice of weapons, and had
+chosen fists, and that the major had been carried away. Dr. Gates
+grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back on the pink
+flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces, united,
+were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the
+hospital. "Although," she commented, "it looks more like a chair
+cover."
+
+Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was
+lined with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she
+straightened the crooked edges she told the doctor about the
+wedding dress, and about the mother who had called her Harmony
+because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by dint of skillful
+listening, which is always better than questioning, the faded
+little woman doctor knew all the story.
+
+She was rather aghast.
+
+"But suppose you cannot find anything to do?"
+
+"I must," simply.
+
+"It's such a terrible city for a girl alone."
+
+"I'm not really alone. I know you now."
+
+"An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!"
+
+"And there is Peter Byrne."
+
+"Peter!" Dr. Gates sniffed. "Peter is poorer than I am, if there
+is any comparison in destitution!"
+
+Harmony stiffened a trifle.
+
+"Of course I do not mean money," she said. "There are such things
+as encouragement, and--and friendliness."
+
+"One cannot eat encouragement," retorted Dr. Gates sagely. "And
+friendliness between you and any man--bah! Even Peter is only
+human, my dear."
+
+"I am sure he is very good."
+
+"So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There,
+I'm a skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall
+in love with him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't
+let him fall in love with you. He probably will."
+
+Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to
+prepare for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne,
+regretting that a headache kept her from taking the afternoon
+walk as she had promised. Also, to avoid meeting him, she did
+without dinner, and spent the afternoon crying herself into a
+headache that was real enough.
+
+Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for
+dinner she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is
+difficult for the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the
+innocence of twenty. For illusions it is apt to substitute facts,
+the material for the spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr.
+Gates, from her school of general practice, had come to view life
+along physiological lines.
+
+With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.
+
+"I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as
+usual."
+
+"Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life--"
+
+"About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool."
+
+Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and
+his best tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather
+stern.
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this
+moment she thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I
+said you were only human. Why it should be evil to be human, or
+human to be evil--"
+
+"I cannot imagine," said Peter slowly, "the reason for any
+conversation about me."
+
+"Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things,
+but it always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in
+common. Then she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world
+was good, everybody was good. She would find a safe occupation
+and all would be well."
+
+"So you warned her against me," said Peter grimly.
+
+"I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I
+make 'way with myself?"
+
+"Cui bono?" demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. "The
+mischief is done."
+
+Dr. Gates looked up at him.
+
+"I'm in love with you myself, Peter!" she said gratefully.
+"Perhaps it is the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in
+cold water that evening and obeyed little Olga's "Bitte sum
+speisen." The chairs round the dining-table were only half
+occupied--a free concert had taken some, Sunday excursions
+others. The little Bulgarian, secretly considered to be a
+political spy, was never about on this one evening of the week.
+Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room
+far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports
+of what he had learned during the week--his gleanings from
+near-by tables in coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours
+after midnight in the cafe, where the Austrian military was wont
+to gather and drink.
+
+Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure,
+and met a tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table
+Frau Schwarz was talking volubly--as if, by mere sound, to
+distract attention from the scantiness of the meal. Under cover
+of the Babel Peter spoke to the girl. Having had his warning his
+tone was friendly, without a hint of the intimacy of the day
+before.
+
+"Better?"
+
+"Not entirely. Somewhat."
+
+"I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to
+suffer from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help
+them."
+
+"I am afraid of headache tablets."
+
+"Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!"
+
+This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all,
+what had she to do with the man himself? He had constituted
+himself her physician. That was all.
+
+"The next time I shall send Olga."
+
+"Good!" he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal
+as he might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful
+indifference, her new-growing confidence.
+
+It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a
+cigarette--according to the custom of the pension, which accorded
+the "Nicht Rauchen" sign the same attention that it did to the
+portrait of the deceased Herr Schwarz--that he turned to her
+again.
+
+"I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night."
+
+Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had
+nerved herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.
+
+"Then you do not prescribe air?"
+
+"That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind
+my going along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else
+to do."
+
+Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a
+swift glance of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He
+was rather exultant himself; certainly he had been adroit.
+
+"I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep," said
+Harmony, who had missed the by-play. "And Old Dog Tray would be a
+very nice companion, I'm sure."
+
+It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter
+had she followed the two in their rambling walk that night.
+Direction mattering little and companionship everything, they
+wandered on, talking of immaterial things--of the rough
+pavements, of the shop windows, of the gray medieval buildings.
+They came to a full stop in front of the Votivkirche, and
+discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the Benk sculptures
+on the facade. And there in the open square, casting diplomacy to
+the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out what was
+in his heart.
+
+"Look here," he said, "you don't care a rap about spires. I don't
+believe you know anything about them. I don't. What did that
+idiot of a woman doctor say to you to-day?"
+
+"I don't know what you mean."
+
+"You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out
+with two premises:  I'm a man, and you're young and attractive.
+Then she draws some sort of fool deduction. You know what I
+mean?"
+
+"I don't see why we need discuss it," said poor Harmony. "Or how
+you know--"
+
+"I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and
+she came to me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to
+you or not, but--we'd started out so well, and then to have it
+spoiled! My dear girl, you are beautiful and I know it. That's
+all the more reason why, if you'll stand for it, you need some
+one to look after you--I'll not say like a brother, because all
+the ones I ever knew were darned poor brothers to their sisters,
+but some one who will keep an eye on you and who isn't going to
+fall in love with you."
+
+"I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish
+you to."
+
+"Certainly not. Besides, I--" Here Peter Byrne had another
+inspiration, not so good as the first--"Besides, there is
+somebody at home, you understand? That makes it all right,
+doesn't it?"
+
+"A girl at home?"
+
+"A girl," said Peter, lying manfully.
+
+"How very nice!" said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter,
+feeling all sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a
+complete restoral of their former comradely relations. From
+abstractions of church towers and street paving they went, with
+the directness of the young, to themselves. Thereafter, during
+that memorable walk, they talked blissful personalities,
+Harmony's future, Peter's career, money--or its lack--their
+ambitions, their hopes, even--and here was intimacy,
+indeed!--their disappointments, their failures of courage, their
+occasional loss of faith in themselves.
+
+The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back
+toward the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and
+melted with a chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression.
+The upper spires of the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist;
+the trees in the park took on, against the gloom of the city
+hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for an occasional pedestrian,
+making his way home under an umbrella, the streets were deserted.
+Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl rejected his
+offer of a taxicab.
+
+"We should be home too quickly," she observed naively. "And we
+have so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by
+giving English lessons in the afternoon and working all morning
+at my music--"
+
+And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening
+gravely, his head bent. And square after square it was borne in
+on him what a precarious future stretched before this girl beside
+him, how very slender her resources, how more than dubious the
+outcome.
+
+Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate
+deep into his soul that night.
+
+Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had
+reestablished a friendship and made a working basis for future
+comradely relations, they were back at the corner of the
+Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned in at the little street,
+a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided with Harmony. He was a
+short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled mustache, and he
+was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin heart in his
+voice, the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann. He saw
+Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When
+Byrne would have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.
+
+"It is only the Portier from the lodge," she said.
+
+The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering
+note, stood before Harmony, bowing.
+
+"The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad," he said thickly.
+"There is no more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier
+from Salzburg who has only one lung."
+
+"But think!" Harmony said in German. "No more practicing in the
+early dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed
+hall! It is better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!"
+
+Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with
+caution and bowed after them.
+
+"Gute Nacht," he called. "Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and
+the salon and a bath of the finest."
+
+As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing
+his unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door
+of the Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.
+
+"Do you mind if I ask one question?"
+
+"You honor me, madam."
+
+"Then--what is the name of the girl back home?"
+
+Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to
+feminine names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he
+recalled:--
+
+"Emma."
+
+"Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!" But there was a touch of
+disappointment in her voice.
+
+Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with
+the master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and
+then a grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and
+the Big Soprano had been right--she had the real thing.
+
+The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening
+itself to an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady
+secretary in the anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the
+old man to one of his rare enthusiasms.
+
+"Six months," he said, "and you will go back to your America and
+show them how over here we teach violin. I will a
+letter--letters-- give you, and you shall put on the programme,
+of your concerts that you are my pupil, is it not so?"
+
+Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a
+little with the praise and excitement.
+
+"If I can stay so long," she answered unsteadily.
+
+"You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is
+finished you talk of going! Gott im Himmel!"
+
+"It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find
+something to do I shall have to go back."
+
+The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to
+rouse his ire against a world that had money for everything but
+music. He spent five minutes in indignant protest, then:--
+
+"But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to
+stay. Perhaps I can now and then find a concert for you." It was
+a lure he had thrown out before, a hook without a bait. It needed
+no bait, being always eagerly swallowed. "And no more talk of
+going away. I refuse to allow. You shall not go."
+
+Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was
+interested. He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty
+Kronen is fifty Kronen, and South American beef is high of price.
+He followed Harmony into the outer room and bowed her out of his
+studio.
+
+"The Fraulein has paid?" he demanded, turning sharply to the lady
+secretary.
+
+"Always."
+
+"After the lesson?"
+
+"Ja, Herr Professor."
+
+"It is better," said the master, "that she pay hereafter before
+the lesson."
+
+"Ja, Herr Professor."
+
+Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's
+name. There were many such crosses on the ledger.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the
+morning, hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the
+moment it was over. He had lectures in the evenings, too, and
+although he lingered for an hour or so after supper it was to
+find Harmony taken possession of by the little Bulgarian, seized
+with a sudden thirst for things American.
+
+On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed
+and helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the
+little Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne
+flung down the stairs and out into the street, almost colliding
+with Stewart.
+
+They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling
+gait of the man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy,
+rather solid tread. The two men were not congenial, and the
+frequent intervals without speech between them were rather for
+lack of understanding than for that completeness of it which
+often fathers long silences.   Byrne was the first to speak after
+their greeting.
+
+"Marie all right?"
+
+"Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this
+week."
+
+"Thanks. Does it matter which night?"
+
+"Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'"
+
+"Say Friday, then."
+
+Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner
+mood failed to notice it.
+
+"Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other
+night?"
+
+"What was that?"
+
+Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.
+
+"Wake up, Byrne!" he said. "You remember well enough. Neither
+the Days nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your
+assistance if you go on living the way you have been. I was at
+Schwarz's. It is the double drain there that tells on one--eating
+little and being eaten much. Those old walls are full of vermin.
+Why don't you take our apartment?"
+
+"Yours?"
+
+"Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and
+Breidau can't take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and
+we're going to Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead
+enough to take a holiday. And if you want the flat for the same
+amount you are spending now, or less, you can have it, and--a
+home, old man."
+
+Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer
+tempted him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.
+
+"Thanks," he said. "I think not."
+
+"Oh, all right." Stewart was rather offended. "I can't do more
+than give you a chance."
+
+They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of
+Sunday had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday
+and Tuesday. The sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of
+the streets; and the smoke from the little stoves in the
+street-cars followed them in depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen
+sat and smoked in the interior of musty cabs. The women
+hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses as they
+worked.
+
+Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his up-turned
+collar; moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather
+than precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a
+vision of the little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the
+table, and the general air of warmth and cheer, and a figure
+presiding over the brick stove in the kitchen. Byrne shook
+himself like a great dog and turned in at the gate of the
+hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
+
+That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she
+turned she faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an
+interest that frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat
+helplessly against barriers of language, of strange customs, of
+stolidity that were not far from absolute cruelty.
+
+She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then,
+as the pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen--also
+in advance,--went on, recklessly. She played marvelously those
+days, crying out through her violin the despair she had sealed
+her lips against. On Thursday, playing for the master, she turned
+to find him flourishing his handkerchief, and went home in a sort
+of daze, incredulous that she could have moved him to tears.
+
+The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up
+the coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the
+chance of seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At
+night in the Cafe Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows
+on the table, a bottle of native wine before him, and dreamed of
+her. He was very fat, the little Georgiev, very swarthy, very
+pathetic. The Balkan kettle was simmering in those days, and he
+had been set to watch the fire. But instead he had kindled a
+flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray words, odd
+glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind her
+ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through
+one of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of
+War down in troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of
+a report in cipher on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in
+fervid hexameter that made even that grim official smile.
+
+Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically:
+so many hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many
+afternoons searching for something to do, making rounds of shops
+where her English might be valuable.
+
+And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one
+experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears
+in her eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first
+interview, under Peter's grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper
+was obviously suspicious of Peter. After that, whenever he could
+escape from clinics, Peter went along, but stayed outside,
+smoking his eternal cigarette, and keeping a watchful eye on
+things inside the shop.
+
+Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was
+not well, from the girl's eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper's
+face, he had opened the door in time to hear enough. He had
+lifted the proprietor bodily and flung him with a crash into a
+glass showcase of ornaments for the hair. Then, entirely cheerful
+and happy, and unmolested by the frightened clerks, he led
+Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic triumph bought her a
+bunch of valley lilies.
+
+Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were
+very bad, indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He
+analyzed his own feeling very carefully, and that was his
+conclusion. Nevertheless he did a quixotic thing--which was
+Peter, of course, all over.
+
+He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea
+came to him there. Hardly came to him, being Marie's originally.
+The little flat was cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened
+her kitchen, brought in a waist she was making and sat sewing
+while the two men talked. Their conversation was technical, a new
+extirpation of the thyroid gland, a recent nephrectomy.
+
+In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She
+struggled with the technicalities of their talk as she sewed,
+finding here and there a comprehensive bit. At those times she
+sat, needle poised, intelligent eyes on the speakers, until she
+lost herself again in the mazes of their English.
+
+At ten o'clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her
+get the stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening
+beer. He took advantage of her absence to broach the matter of
+Harmony.
+
+"She's up against it, as a matter of fact," he finished. "It
+ought to be easy enough for her to find something, but it isn't."
+
+"I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she's rather
+handsome, isn't she?"
+
+"That's one of the difficulties. Yes."
+
+Stewart smoked and reflected. "No friends here at all?"
+
+"None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home."
+
+"Could she teach violin?"
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Aren't there any kids in the American colony who want lessons?
+There's usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any
+entertainments of the Doctors' Club."
+
+"They don't want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I
+could put a card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!" cried Peter
+with a burst of honest resentment, "why do I have to be poor?"
+
+"If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money,
+could you?"
+
+Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he
+found in his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was
+carefully filling the mugs. "Why do you not marry her?" she asked
+unexpectedly. "Then you could take this flat. We are going to
+Semmering for the winter sports. I would show her about the
+stove."
+
+"Marry her, of course!" said Peter gravely. "Just pick her up and
+carry her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to
+marry me need have nothing to do with it."
+
+"Ah, but does she not wish it?" demanded Marie. "Are you so
+certain, stupid big one? Do not women always love you?"
+
+Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back
+to the Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest,
+almost humble. It had never occurred to him that women might care
+for him for himself. In his struggling life there had been little
+time for women. But about himself as the solution of a
+problem--that was different.
+
+He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the
+girl's being willing, was Stewart right--could two people live as
+cheaply as one? Marie was an Austrian and knew how to
+manage--that was different. And another thing troubled him. He
+dreaded to disturb the delicate adjustment of their relationship;
+the terra incognita of a young girl's mind daunted him. There was
+another consideration which he put resolutely in the back of his
+mind--his career. He had seen many a promising one killed by
+early marriage, men driven to the hack work of the profession by
+the scourge of financial necessity. But that was a matter of the
+future; the necessity was immediate.
+
+The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered
+Schneeberg drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress
+defended by the elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized
+again. Peter Byrne battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he
+fought he made his decision.
+
+He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was
+afraid of the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity
+might prevail, and in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of
+his position. He almost ran up the winding staircase. At the top
+his cold fingers fumbled the key and he swore under his breath.
+He slammed the door behind him. Peter always slammed doors, and
+had an apologetic way of opening the door again and closing it
+gently, as if to show that he could.   Harmony's room was dark,
+but he had surprised her once into a confession that when she was
+very downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue
+indeed. So he stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from
+Dr. Gates's room across there came a hum of conversation. He knew
+at once that Harmony was there.
+
+Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand
+over his hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries
+to a proposal of marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the
+door.
+
+Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and
+in deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with
+pins, and pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was
+still under way.
+
+"Peter!" she cried. "Come in and get warm."
+
+Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round
+her shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.
+
+"Please go out!" she said. "I am not dressed."
+
+"You are covered," returned Anna Gates. "That's all that any sort
+of clothing can do. Don't mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed.
+Look out for pins!"
+
+Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed
+door and stared at Harmony--Harmony in the red light from the
+little open door of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit
+of white petticoat; Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and
+tied out of her eyes with an encircling band of rosy flannel.
+
+"Do sit!" cried Anna Gates. "You fill the room so. Bless you,
+Peter, what a collar!"
+
+No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve
+of proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter,
+seated now on the bed, writhed.
+
+"I rapped at Miss Wells's door," he said. "You were not there."
+
+This last, of course, to Harmony.
+
+Anna Gates sniffed.
+
+"Naturally!"
+
+"I had something to say to you. I--I dare say it is hardly
+pension etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say
+it there?"
+
+Harmony smiled above the flannel.
+
+"Could you call it through the door?" 
+
+"Hardly."
+
+"Fiddlesticks!" said Dr. Gates, rising. "I'll go over, of course,
+but not for long. There's no fire."
+
+With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.
+
+"Please!" she implored. "I am not dressed and I'd rather not."
+She turned to Peter. "You can say it before her, can't you?
+She--I have told her all about things."
+
+Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that
+night. Then:--
+
+"It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment
+furnished--you could learn to use the stove, unless, of course,
+you don't like housekeeping--and food is really awfully cheap.
+Why, at these delicatessen places and bakeshops--"
+
+Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates's quizzical glance
+fixed on him, and Harmony's startled eyes.
+
+"What I am trying to say," he exploded, "is that I believe if you
+would marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow." He
+was talking for time now, against Harmony's incredulous face.
+"You'd be taking on others, of course. I'm not much and I'm as
+poor--well, you know. It--it was the apartment that gave me the
+idea--"
+
+"And the stove!" said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous
+laughter. After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It
+was real mirth with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that
+curious laughter of women that is not far from tears.
+
+Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and
+made a last feeble attempt to stick to his guns.
+
+"I mean it. You know I'm not in love with you or you with me, of
+course. But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might
+get along. Lord knows I need some one to look after me!"
+
+"And Emma?"
+
+"There is no Emma. I made her up."
+
+Harmony sobered at that.
+
+"It is only"--she gasped a little for breath--"it is only
+your--your transparency, Peter." It was the first time she had
+called him Peter. "You know how things are with me and you want
+to help me, and out of your generosity you are willing to take on
+another burden. Oh, Peter!"
+
+And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat
+the laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the
+cover of mirth.
+
+Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them
+both sternly through her glasses.
+
+"Once for all," she said brusquely, "let such foolishness end.
+Peter, I am ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you--not yet, not
+for a dozen years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not
+every man can be what you may be if you keep your senses and stay
+single. And the same is true for you, girl. To tide over a bad
+six months you would sacrifice the very thing you are both
+struggling for?"
+
+"I'm sure we don't intend to do it," replied Harmony meekly.
+
+"Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes,
+remember what I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal
+to the other. Now go away and let me alone. I'm not accustomed to
+proposals of marriage."
+
+It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself
+off to the bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was
+as comfortable as a washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also
+Harmony's problem was yet unsolved. Also she had called him
+Peter.
+
+Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of
+that?
+
+At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had
+managed to warm the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off,
+Anna Gates knocked at his door.
+
+"Yes?" said Peter, still comfortably asleep.
+
+"It is Dr. Gates."
+
+"Sorry, Doctor--have to 'xcuse me," mumbled Peter from the
+blanket.
+
+"Peter!"
+
+Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up
+in bed.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Open the door just a crack."
+
+Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the
+coverings up to retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast
+from the open window blew round him, setting everything movable
+in the little room to quivering. He fumbled in the dark for his
+slippers, failed to find them, and yawning noisily went to the
+door.
+
+Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair
+was out of its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising
+six-inch plait down her back. She had no glasses, and over the
+candle-frame she peered shortsightedly at Peter.
+
+"It's about Jimmy," she said. "I don't know what's got into me,
+but I've forgotten for three days. It's a good bit more than time
+for a letter."
+
+"Great Scott!"
+
+"Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted
+a little. The nurse found him crying."
+
+"The poor little devil!" said Peter contritely. "Overdue, is it?
+I'll fix it to-night."
+
+"Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I'm
+off at seven."
+
+"The envelope?"
+
+"Here it is. And take my candle. I'm going to bed."
+
+That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from
+the twin clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the
+Stephansplatz across the city. It found Peter with the window
+closed, sitting up in bed, a candle balanced on one knee, a
+writing-tablet on the other.
+
+He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he
+had taken part that day, including a detailed description of the
+quarry, which weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty
+pounds, Peter being strong on imagination and short on facts as
+regards the Alpine chamois. Then, trying to read the letter from
+a small boy's point of view and deciding that it lacked snap, he
+added by way of postscript a harrowing incident of avalanche,
+rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a sort of glow of
+authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off the
+chamois.
+
+The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed
+to Jimmy Conroy--an envelope that stamped the whole episode as
+authentic, bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the
+postmark of a tiny village in the Austrian Tyrol.
+
+It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled
+himself to sleep.
+
+It was just two o'clock when the night nurse, making rounds in
+her ward in the general hospital, found a small boy very much
+awake on his pillow, and taking off her felt slipper shook it
+at him in pretended fury.
+
+"Now, thou bad one!" she said. "Awake, when the Herr Doktor
+orders sleep! Shall I use the slipper?"
+
+The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.
+
+"I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the
+mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes--"
+
+"The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter
+of a certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy
+father has perhaps captured a great boar, or a--a chamois, and he
+writes of it."
+
+"Do chamois have horns?"
+
+"Ja. Great horns--so."
+
+"He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?"
+
+"None. Now sleep, or--the slipper."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+So far Harmony's small world in the old city had consisted of
+Scatchy and the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off
+in the firmament the master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had
+gone, weeping anxious postcards from every way station it is
+true, but nevertheless gone. Peter and Anna Gates remained, and
+the master as long as her funds held out. To them now she was
+about to add Jimmy.
+
+The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor's chaos of
+pink flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and
+complete even to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to
+be presented. It was with mingled emotions that Anna Gates
+wrapped it up and gave it to Harmony the next morning.
+
+"He hasn't been so well the last day or two," she said. "He
+doesn't sleep much--that's the worst of those heart conditions.
+Sometimes, while I've been working on this thing, I've
+wondered--Well, we're making a fight anyhow. And better take the
+letter, too, Harry. I might forget and make lecture notes on it,
+and if I spoil that envelope--"
+
+Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital,
+meeting the doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy's
+little story quite well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.
+
+"Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear," she had
+finished. "You think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and
+hope; I think I have my own little tragedy, because I have to go
+through the rest of life alone, when taken in time I'd have been
+a good wife and mother. Still I have my work. But this little
+chap, brought over here by a father who hoped to see him cured,
+and spent all he had to bring him here, and then--died. It gets
+me by the throat."
+
+"And the boy does not know?" Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.
+
+"No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the
+mountains. When we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he
+was buried. It took about all the money there was. He wrote home
+about it, too, to the place they came from. There has never been
+any reply. Then ever since Peter has written these letters. Jimmy
+lives for them."
+
+Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that.
+Peter thought thus. A very large part of Harmony's life was Peter
+in those days.
+
+She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital
+for Anna Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt
+hair, of his letter that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his
+quixotic proposal of the night before. Of the proposal, most of
+all--it was so eminently characteristic of Peter, from the
+conception of the plan to its execution. Harmony's thought of
+Peter  was very tender that morning as she stood in the arched
+gateway out of reach of the wind from the Schneeberg. The
+tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made her very
+beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for a
+bus, and stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm,
+recognized and admired her. After all, the American women were
+chic, she decided, although some of the doctors had wives of a
+dowdiness--Himmel! And she could copy the Fraulein's hat for two
+Kronen and a bit of ribbon she possessed.
+
+The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a
+Dozent with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into
+it, and the Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could
+not marry because the hospital board forbade it, made a speech
+for Jimmy in awe-inspiring German, ending up with a poem that was
+intended to be funny, but that made the nurses cry. From which it
+will be seen that Jimmy was a great favorite.
+
+During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a
+ceremony, Jimmy kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates's hand
+and waited. That the letter had come was enough. He lay back in
+anticipatory joy, and let himself be talked over, and bathrobed,
+and his hair parted Austrian fashion and turned up over a finger,
+which is very Austrian indeed. He liked Harmony. The girl caught
+his eyes on her more than once. He interrupted the speech once to
+ask her just what part of the robe she had made, and whether she
+had made the tassel. When she admitted the tassel, his admiration
+became mixed with respect.
+
+It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the
+barred window behind Jimmy's bed, and brought into dazzling
+radiance the pink bathrobe, and Harmony's eyes, and fat Nurse
+Elisabet's white apron. It lay on the bedspread in great squares,
+outlined by the shadows of the window bars. Now and then the
+sentry, pacing outside, would advance as far as Jimmy's window,
+and a warlike silhouette of military cap and the upper end of a
+carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events, however, were
+rare, the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and the
+odor of boiling onions from the lodge just inside.
+
+The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the
+nurses went about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a
+hairpin from her hair and made a great show of opening the many
+times opened envelope.
+
+"The letter at last!" she said. "Shall I read it or will you?"
+
+"You read it. It takes me so long. I'll read it all day, after
+you are gone. I always do."
+
+Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter's first
+halting lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold.
+They were mainly an apology for the delay. Then forgetting
+discomfort in the joy of creation, he became more comfortable.
+The account of the near-accident was wonderfully graphic; the
+description of the chamois was fervid, if not accurate. But
+consternation came with the end.
+
+The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The
+doctor read on.
+
+"For Heaven's sake," said Peter's frantic postscript, "find out
+how much a medium-sized chamois--"
+
+Dr. Gates stopped "--ought to weigh," was the rest of it, "and
+fix it right in the letter. The kid's too smart to be fooled and
+I never saw a chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns,
+haven't they?"
+
+"That's funny!" said Jimmy Conway.
+
+"That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake," remarked Dr.
+Gates, with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to
+Harmony.
+
+"How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?"
+
+"I think," observed Harmony, leaning forward, "that little boys
+must not ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is
+only six weeks off."
+
+"I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the
+boar's tusks."
+
+For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter
+of a boar, had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of
+tusks. The tusks had not been so difficult. But horns!
+
+Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more
+questions. The morning's excitement had tired him, and he lay
+back. Dr. Gates went to hold a whispered consultation with the
+nurse, and came back, looking grave.
+
+The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.
+
+The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony--to find
+some one worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire
+of women to do something, however small, for some one else. Her
+own troubles looked very small to her that day as she left the
+hospital and stepped out into the bright sunshine.
+
+She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to
+him.
+
+"Do you wish to do a very kind thing?" she asked in German.
+
+Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea,
+and nay, nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the
+sun was moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was
+near.
+
+"What do you wish?"
+
+"Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do
+not think--perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not,
+now and then, pass the window? It pleases him."
+
+"Pass the window! But why?"
+
+"In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and
+the gun."
+
+"Ah, the gun!" He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an
+officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street,
+he stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space.
+But the girl knew he would do as she had desired.
+
+That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the
+professors at the hospital desired English conversation at two
+Kronen an hour.
+
+Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony
+was engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did
+much more than offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her
+self-confidence, although the immediate result was rather tragic.
+
+The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with
+Harmony, engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that
+afternoon. It was the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived
+five minutes late, panting, hat awry, and so full of the Frau
+Professor Bergmeister that she could think of nothing else.
+
+Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her
+fifty Kronen before the secretary as she went in. The master was
+out of humor. Should he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept
+waiting for a chit of a girl--only, of course, he said "das
+Kindchen" or some other German equivalent for chit--and then have
+her come into the sacred presence breathless, and salute him
+between gasps as the Frau Professor Bergmeister?
+
+Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also
+rather tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed,
+Harmony dropped her bow. In point of heinousness this classes
+with dropping one's infant child from an upper window, or sitting
+on the wrong side of a carriage when with a lady.
+
+The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at
+Harmony. Then with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked
+to the outer room, and picking up the envelope with the fifty
+Kronen held it out to her without a word.
+
+Harmony's world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly
+at the envelope in her hand, at the master's retreating back.
+
+Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled
+together. Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady
+secretary touched her arm.
+
+"It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is
+sorry. You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will
+be well. You are his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat
+for grief that he has hurt you."
+
+The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary's voice was
+unmistakable. Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the
+two students who had laughed. They were not laughing now.
+Something of fellowship and understanding passed between them in
+the glance. After all, it was in the day's work--would come to
+one of them next, perhaps. And they had much in common--the
+struggle, their faith, the everlasting loneliness, the little
+white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.
+
+Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of
+days, Harmony went down the three long flights and out into the
+brightness of the winter day.
+
+On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward
+her, giving a definite impression of being bound for some
+particular destination and of being behind time. That this was
+not the case was shown by the celerity with which, when he saw
+Harmony, he turned about and walked with her.
+
+"I had an hour or two," he explained, "and I thought I'd walk.
+But walking is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk
+alone. How about the Frau Professor?"
+
+"She has taken me on. I'm very happy. But, Dr. Byrne--"
+
+"You called me Peter last night."
+
+"That was different. You had just proposed to me."
+
+"Oh, if that's all that's necessary--" He stopped in the center
+of the busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.
+
+"Please, Peter!"
+
+"Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?"
+
+"She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer
+them."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+"Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes."
+
+"Never owned anything taxable except a dog--and that wasn't a tax
+anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or
+surgery, where I'd be of some use?"
+
+"She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties."
+
+"Well, I've got something to say on that." He pulled from his
+overcoat pocket a largish bundle--Peter always bulged with
+packages--and held it out for her to see. "Tell the Frau
+Professor Bergmeister with my compliments," he said, "that
+because some idiot at home sent me five pounds of tobacco,
+hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here, I have passed
+from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian customs
+have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty.
+I offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it."
+
+"Really, Peter?"
+
+"Really."
+
+Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars
+was fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She
+reached over and patted his arm.
+
+"You'll make it up in some way. Can't you cut off some little
+extravagance?"
+
+"I might cut down on my tailor bills." He looked down at himself
+whimsically. "Or on ties. I'm positively reckless about ties!"
+
+They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with
+that eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed
+on a dog-trot. Peter looked at them critically.
+
+"Bosnians," he observed. "Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine
+out of ten of them tubercular. It's a rotten game, this military
+play of Europe. How's Jimmy?"
+
+"We left him very happy with your letter."
+
+Peter flushed. "I expect it was pretty poor stuff," he
+apologized. "I've never seen the Alps except from a train window,
+and as for a chamois--"
+
+"He says his father will surely send him the horns."
+
+Peter groaned.
+
+"Of course!" he said. "Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an
+eagle? One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really
+liked the letter?"
+
+"He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his
+hands."
+
+Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten,
+he talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be
+done, if only there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He
+had had a boys' club at home during his short experience in
+general practice. Boys were his hobby.
+
+"Scum of the earth, most of them," he said, his plain face
+glowing. "Dirty little beggars off the street. At first they
+stole my tobacco; and one of them pawned a medical book or two!
+Then they got to playing the game right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish
+you could have seen  them! Used to line 'em up and make 'em
+spell, and the two best spellers were allowed to fight it out
+with gloves--my own method, and it worked. Spell! They'd spell
+their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee, how I hated
+to give them up!"
+
+This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met
+before. For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He
+had always seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of
+his elder brother attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly
+rather shy, a bit aloof. Peter felt the change and thought she
+was bored. He talked of other things.
+
+A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the
+Pension Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the
+trunk, in ulster and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather
+frightened, was coming down with a traveling-bag. She put down
+the bag and scuttled up the staircase like a scared rabbit.   
+The little doctor was grim. She eyed Peter and Harmony with an
+impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.
+
+"I've been waiting for you two," she flung at them. "I've had a
+terrific row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!"
+
+It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development,
+after everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She
+had clung, at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of
+affection, to the sharp little doctor with her mannish
+affectations, her soft and womanly heart.
+
+"Sit down, child." Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. "You are
+fagged out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to
+me? How much did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of
+virtue?"
+
+It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.
+
+"I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional,
+but it will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will
+be cheaper, I'm sure of that: We are all going out to the
+hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for
+us!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her
+trunk in the cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the
+conversational bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension
+Schwarz.
+
+Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the
+lodge of Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars--back, but
+with a difference. True, the gate still swung back and forward on
+rusty hinges, obedient to every whim of the December gales; but
+the casement windows in the salon no longer creaked or admitted
+drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of rubber weather-casing. The
+grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented extravagance, had
+gone never to return, and in its corner stood a battered but
+still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a table with
+an oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove
+gleamed warm with fire. On the table by the lamp were the
+combined medical books of Peter and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray
+which also they used in common.
+
+Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria
+Theresa. But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door
+of the stove open, and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had
+been washed, with Harmony playing softly, it took resolution on
+Peter's part to put on his overcoat and face a lecture on the
+resection of a rib or a discussion of the function of the
+pituitary body.
+
+The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not
+only greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly
+cheap. Coal, which had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the
+Pension Schwarz, they bought in quantity and could afford to use
+lavishly. Oil for the lamp was a trifle. They dined on venison
+now and then, when the shop across boasted a deer from the
+mountains. They had other game occasionally, when Peter, carrying
+home a mysterious package, would make them guess what it might
+contain. Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits. She
+knew how to cook rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.
+
+For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much
+coaxing to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the
+extravagance of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg
+with one lung, or the tendency of the delicatessen seller to
+weigh short if one did not watch him. Peter was firm.
+
+It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.
+
+"Don't be too obstinate, Peter," she admonished him. "The child
+needs occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep
+up the financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep
+house to her heart's content. That can be her contribution to the
+general fund."
+
+And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without
+demur from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who
+irritated Anna almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from
+end to end to make certain of her usefulness.
+
+A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the
+Portier shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with
+the wife of the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways
+and not as the Austrians.
+
+The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it
+least of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly
+than women, and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He
+had gained a pound or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was
+unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was growing round and rosy, and
+Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real change was in Harmony
+herself.
+
+The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by
+which such changes come--not in a month or a year; but in an
+hour, a breath. One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young
+creature, all emotion, quivering at a word, aloof at a glance,
+prone to occasional introspection and mysterious daydreams; the
+next she was a young woman, tender but not shyly so, incredibly
+poised, almost formidably dignified on occasion, but with little
+girlish lapses into frolic and high spirits.
+
+The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They
+had been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at
+the Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents,
+to be recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort,
+with every odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the
+hospital Jimmy had had a bad week again. It had been an anxious
+time for all of them. In vain the sentry had stopped outside the
+third window and smiled and nodded through it; in vain--when the
+street was deserted and there was none to notice--he went through
+a bit of the manual of arms on the pavement outside, ending by
+setting his gun down with a martial and ringing clang.
+
+In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing
+unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland
+as never was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all
+hornless, as he carefully emphasized.
+
+And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and
+with the aid of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and
+set it in the barred window. The real sentry had been very much
+astonished; he had almost fallen over backward. On recovering he
+went entirely through the manual of arms, and was almost seen by
+an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all most exciting.
+
+Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had
+taken him some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her
+first essay in jelly and Jimmy being frank with the candor of
+childhood. The jelly had been a great success.
+
+It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very
+near his heart.
+
+"The horns haven't come, have they?" he asked wistfully.
+
+"No, not yet."
+
+"Do you think he got my letter about them?"
+
+"He answered it, didn't he?"
+
+Jimmy drew a long breath. "It's very funny. He's mostly so quick.
+If I had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the
+foot of the bed. And I could pretend I was hunting."
+
+Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she
+saw hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the
+delicatessen store a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag.
+Like the others it hung head down, and as it swayed on its hook
+its great antlers tapped against the shop door as if mutely
+begging admission.
+
+She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained,
+implored. Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with
+her. The wild-game seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer
+entire, or he would mount head and antlers for his wife's cousin
+in Galicia as a Christmas gift.
+
+Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was
+profoundly depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home
+early and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a
+fleeting smile. Anna was not yet home.
+
+Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony
+made a movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.
+
+"Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always
+beautiful, but--you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony."
+
+"That is because you like me. We always think our friends are
+beautiful."
+
+"I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful."
+
+The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the
+table, and Peter before the stove were very close together. The
+dusk was fast fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back
+of the old house few street sounds penetrated. Round them,
+shutting them off together from the world of shops with lighted
+windows, rumbling busses and hurrying humanity, lay the old lodge
+with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed halls, its dark and
+twisting staircases.
+
+Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner
+with the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him.
+But it had been growing increasingly hard. He was only human
+after all. And he was very comfortable. Love, healthy human love,
+thrives on physical ease. Indigestion is a greater foe to it than
+poverty. Great love songs are written, not by poets starving in
+hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger gnawing and undermining all
+that is of the spirit, but by full-fed gentlemen who sing out of
+an overflowing of content and wide fellowship, and who write, no
+doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does not thrive
+on hunger.
+
+Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in
+the struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in
+his busy life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams,
+to waken himself savagely to the fact that not for many years
+could he afford the luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of
+soft arms about his neck. So he had kept away from women with
+almost ferocious determination. And now!
+
+He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or
+sitting, he was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the
+chair, with his hands hanging, fingers interlaced between his
+knees.
+
+The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features.
+Harmony, knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.
+
+"I think you are sad to-night, Peter."
+
+"Depressed a bit. That's all."
+
+"It isn't money again?"
+
+It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week
+before Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant
+that he was a hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought.
+This discovery had been very upsetting.
+
+"Not more than usual. Don't mind me. I'll probably end in a
+roaring bad temper and smash something. My moody spells often
+break up that way!"
+
+Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat
+rested a hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.
+
+"I have hurt you in some way?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"Could--could you talk about whatever it is? That helps
+sometimes."
+
+"You wouldn't understand."
+
+"You haven't quarreled with Anna?" Harmony asked, real concern in
+her voice.
+
+"No. Good Lord, Harmony, don't ask me what's wrong! I don't know
+myself."
+
+He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against
+the wall. Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table.
+The kitchen was entirely dark, save for the firelight, which
+gleamed on the bare floor and the red legs of the table. She was
+fumbling with a match and the candle when she realized that Peter
+was just behind her, very close.
+
+"Dearest," he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to
+him, was kissing her lips, her hair.
+
+Harmony's heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against
+him. The gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness,
+his starved senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.
+
+After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her
+go. Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The
+storm that had torn him root and branch from his firm ground of
+self-restraint left her only shaken. He was still very close to
+her; she could hear him breathing. He did not attempt to speak.
+With every atom of strength that was left in him he was fighting
+a mad desire to take her in his arms again and keep her there.
+
+That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.
+
+She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she
+turned and faced him.
+
+"That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter," she said
+quietly.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"There isn't any question about it."
+
+He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her
+still obsessed him. "Why not? Why should I not take you in my
+arms? If there is a moment of happiness to be had in this grind
+of work and loneliness--"
+
+"It has not made me happy."
+
+Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so
+effectual. Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion
+in her voice. He knew then that he had left her unstirred. He
+dropped his outstretched arms.
+
+"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it."
+
+"I would rather not talk about it, please."
+
+The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had
+arrived and was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew
+a long breath, and, after his habit, shook himself.
+
+"Very well, we'll not talk of it. But, for Heaven's sake,
+Harmony, don't avoid me. I'm not a cad. I'll let you alone."
+
+There was only time for a glance of understanding between them,
+of promise from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna
+Gates entered the kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and
+Peter filling up an already overfed stove.
+
+That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the
+thrifty city fathers of the old town had shut off the street
+lights because two hours later the sun would rise and furnish
+light that cost the taxpayers nothing, the Portier's wife
+awakened.
+
+The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions
+when the Portier's wife awakened in the night and heard the twin
+clocks of the Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps,
+while the delicatessen seller ambled home from the Schubert
+Society, singing beerily as he ambled, she was wont to hear from
+the bed beside hers the rhythmic respiration that told her how
+safe from Schubert Societies and such like evils was her lord.
+There was no sound at all.
+
+The Portier's wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over.
+Owing to the width of the table that stood between the beds and
+to a sweeping that day which had left the beds far apart she met
+nothing but empty air. Words had small effect on the Portier, who
+slept fathoms deep in unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to
+get up--the floor was cold and a wind blowing. Could she not hear
+it and the creaking of the deer across the street, as it swung on
+its hook?
+
+The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the
+iron candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at
+the Portier's pillow. No startled yell followed.
+
+Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier's wife forgot the cold
+floor and the wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.
+
+Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it
+even stood open an inch or two.
+
+Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the
+door and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman
+scorned kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three
+quarters of an hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from
+iron to ice, from ice to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not
+come back and the door chain swung in the wind.
+
+At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had
+changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert
+Society--What was that?
+
+From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
+
+She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now
+lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled
+with suspicion.
+
+"Thou hast been out of thy bed!"
+
+"But no!"
+
+"An hour since the bed was empty."
+
+"Thou dreamest."
+
+"The chain is off the door."
+
+"Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the
+Americans above? Sleep and keep peace."
+
+He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier's wife
+crawled into her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson
+feather comfort. But her soul was shaken.
+
+The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones
+out to do his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might
+be told by the soles of the feet, which were always soiled.
+
+At dawn the Portier's wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her
+sleeping lord's feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite
+black, as of one who had tramped in garden mould.
+
+Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened
+the door from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set
+out a pitcher for the milk.
+
+On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across
+the street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was
+written the one word, "Still!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps
+by which the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great
+leaps but with a thousand small and painful steps, and here and
+there it leaves its mark, a footprint on a naked soul. We trace a
+life by its scars, as a tree by its rings.
+
+Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and
+this with every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine
+affection for the girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it
+was of illusions that Harmony's veil had been woven. To Anna
+Gates, worn with a thousand sleepless nights, a thousand
+thankless days, withered before her time with the struggling
+routine of medical practice, sapped with endless calls for
+sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became
+physiological.
+
+Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was
+rent.
+
+To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious
+creed, a philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung
+strange bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities,
+personal liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for
+modern law and the prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and
+her prophet.
+
+In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no
+mischief. Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even
+in the event of the opportunity it was doubtful whether she would
+have had the strength of her convictions. Men love theories, but
+seldom have the courage of them, and Anna Gates was largely
+masculine. Women, being literal, are apt to absorb dangerous
+doctrine and put it to the test. When it is false doctrine they
+discover it too late.
+
+Harmony was now a woman.
+
+Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the
+girl to harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see
+Harmony's eyes widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs.
+Nothing pleased her more than to pit her individualism against
+the girl's rigid and conventional morality, and down her by some
+apparently unanswerable argument.
+
+On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument
+took place--hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of
+mental fencing. Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at
+home. Harmony had been practicing, and at the end she played a
+little winter song by some modern composer. It breathed all the
+purity of a white winter's day; it was as chaste as ice and as
+cold; and yet throughout was the thought of green things hiding
+beneath the snow and the hope of spring.
+
+Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was
+rather ashamed of her thought.
+
+"It seems that way to me," she finished apologetically. "It
+sounds rather silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person
+who composes certain things."
+
+"And this gentleman who writes of winter?"
+
+"I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any
+one."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it,
+exactly as in books--the difference between a love story
+and--and--"
+
+"--a dictionary!"
+
+"You always laugh," Harmony complained
+
+"That's better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way
+things go in this world I want to weep always."
+
+"I don't find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but
+there are good ones."
+
+"Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose."
+
+"There are plenty of good men."
+
+"What do you call a good man?"
+
+Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:--
+
+"Honorable men."
+
+Anna smiled. "My dear child," she said, "you substitute the code
+of a gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a
+monogamist?"
+
+Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.
+
+"Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I
+suppose! When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a
+dozen wives. To-day in our part of the globe there is one
+woman--and a fifth over--for every man. Each man gets one woman,
+and for every five couples there is a derelict like myself,
+mateless."
+
+Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony.
+Her resentment at her single condition, because it left her
+childless, brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the
+girl. In the atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single
+women were always presumed to be thus by choice and to regard
+with certain tolerance those weaker sisters who had married.
+Anna, on the contrary, was frankly a derelict, frankly regretted
+her maiden condition and railed with bitterness against her
+enforced childlessness. The near approach of Christmas had for
+years found her morose and resentful. There are, here and there,
+such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives, their
+sole passion that of maternity.
+
+Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in
+her resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever
+known, and offered her instead an incredible liberty in the name
+of the freedom of the individual. Harmony found all her
+foundations of living shaken, and though refusing to accept
+Anna's theories, found her faith in her own weakened. She sat
+back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up out of her
+discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written
+high in its firmament.
+
+When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at
+the girl's stricken face.
+
+"I'm a fool!" she said contritely. "If Peter had been here he'd
+have throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple,
+and theorists are the anarchists of society. There's only one
+comfort about us--we never live up to our convictions. Now forget
+all this rot I've been talking."
+
+Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two
+for Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano
+for Harmony from New York. The Big Soprano  was very glad to be
+back and spent two pages over her chances for concert work.
+
+". . . I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had
+had the money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing 'Brunnhilde,'
+it would have helped a lot. I could have said I'd sung in opera
+in Europe and at least have had a hearing at the Met. But I
+didn't, and I'm back at the church again and glad to get my old
+salary. If it's at all possible, stay until the master has
+presented you in a concert. He's quite right, you haven't a
+chance unless he does. And now I'll quit grumbling.
+
+"Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely,
+flushed with excitement and having been up since dawn curling her
+hair. He was rather a disappointment--small and blond, with light
+blue eyes, and almost dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn't care
+how pale a man's eyes were if he looked at me the way Henry
+looked at her.
+
+"They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to
+be alone together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could
+swallow for the lump in my throat, by myself. I was homesick
+enough in old Wien, but I am just as homesick now that I am here,
+for we are really homesick only for people, not places. And no
+one really cared whether I came back or not."
+
+Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day
+before, but with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the
+situation was unpleasant and decide to leave? What if a reckless
+impulse, recklessly carried out, were to break up an arrangement
+that had made a green oasis of happiness and content for all of
+them in the desert of their common despair?
+
+If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to
+argue, to justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally.
+He almost groaned aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the
+wintry garden.
+
+He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his
+word. "I am not a beast. I'll let you alone," he had said. She
+had had a bad night, as nights go. She had gone through the
+painful introspection which, in a thoroughly good girl, always
+follows such an outburst as Peter's. Had she said or done
+anything to make him think--Surely she had not! Had she been
+wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.
+
+While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an
+unaccustomed silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron
+candlestick in hand, Harmony, having read the Litany through in
+the not particularly religious hope of getting to sleep, was
+dreaming placidly. It was Peter who tossed and turned almost all
+night. Truly there had been little sleep that night in the old
+hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the
+kitchen while supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories
+forgotten and wearing a knitted shawl against drafts, was making
+a salad, and Harmony, all anxiety and flushed with heat, was
+broiling a steak.
+
+Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and
+prayer.
+
+"Peter," she called, "you may set the table. And try to lay the
+cloth straight."
+
+Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched
+business of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in
+mouth.
+
+"Suppose I refuse?" he questioned. "You--you haven't been very
+friendly with me to-day, Harry."
+
+"I?"
+
+"Don't quarrel, you children," cried Anna, beating eggs
+vigorously. "Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The
+Portier loves her."
+
+"I'm sure I said good-evening to you."
+
+"You usually say, 'Good-evening, Peter.'"
+
+"And I did not?"
+
+"You did not."
+
+"Then--Good-evening, Peter."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his
+yesterday's promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with
+forgiveness and restoration.
+
+"Sometimes," said Peter humbly, "when I am in very great favor,
+you say, 'Good-evening, Peter, dear.'"
+
+"Good-evening, Peter, dear," said Harmony.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving
+smoothly. Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and
+through Marie's frugality and the extra month's wages at
+Christmas, which was Marie's annual perquisite, being temporarily
+in funds the sky seemed clear enough, and Walter Stewart started
+on his holiday with a comfortable sense of financial security.
+
+Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie's
+temporary exile in the apartment across the hall, was captivated
+by the comfort of the little suite and by its order. Her
+housewifely mind, restless with long inactivity in a pension,
+seized on the bright pans of Marie's kitchen and the promise of
+the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She disapproved of Stewart, having
+heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or
+suspicious about this orderly establishment. Mrs. Boyer was a
+placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card
+club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty years'
+accumulation, that "Frank" might catch up with his profession.
+
+She had explained it rather tremulously at home.
+
+"Father wants to go," she said. "You children are big enough now
+to be left. He's always wanted to do it, but we couldn't go while
+you were little."
+
+"But, mother!" expostulated the oldest girl. "When you are so
+afraid of the ocean! And a year!"
+
+"What is to be will be," she had replied. "If I'm going to be
+drowned I'll be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub.
+And I'll not let father go alone."
+
+Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the
+children gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so
+elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to
+purchase anything abroad. She had gone through Paris looking
+straight ahead lest her eyes lead her into the temptation of the
+shops. In Vienna she wore her home-town outfit with
+determination, vaguely conscious that the women about her had
+more style, were different. She priced unsuitable garments
+wistfully, and went home to her trunks full of best materials
+that would never wear out. The children, knowing her, had bought
+the best.
+
+To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is
+hard to say by what psychology he found their respectability so
+satisfactory. It was as though his own status gained by it. He
+had much the same feeling about the order and decency with which
+Marie managed the apartment, as if irregularity were thus
+regularized.
+
+Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn
+an experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were
+drawn under her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very
+pretty, rather frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had
+sulked for an entire evening.
+
+So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of
+disorder, so conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart
+breaking the law and trying to keep the letter!
+
+On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There
+was much to do. The house must be left clean and shining. There
+must be no feminine gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it
+was not a purely masculine establishment. At the last moment, so
+late that it sent her heart into her mouth, she happened on the
+box of rouge hidden from Stewart's watchful eyes. She gave it to
+the milk girl.
+
+Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr
+Doktor's American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy,
+bound with iron. And with her own clothing she packed Stewart's,
+the dress-suit he had worn once to the Embassy, a hat that
+folded, strange American shoes, and books--always books. The Herr
+Doktor would study at Semmering. When all was in readiness and
+Stewart was taking a final survey, Marie ran downstairs and
+summoned a cab. It did not occur to her to ask him to do it.
+Marie's small life was one of service, and besides there was an
+element in their relationship that no one but Marie suspected,
+and that she hid even from herself. She was very much in love
+with this indifferent American, this captious temporary god of
+her domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred to
+Stewart; but Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had
+more than once caught a look in Marie's eyes as she turned them
+on the other man, and had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.
+
+When the train was well under way, however, and he found no
+disturbing element among the three others in the compartment,
+Stewart relaxed. Semmering was a favorite resort with the
+American colony, but not until later in the winter. In December
+there were rains in the mountains, and low-lying clouds that
+invested some of the chalets in constant fog. It was not until
+the middle of January that the little mountain train became
+crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and
+jaunty feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with
+Alpine cloaks and iron-pointed sticks.
+
+Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her
+life, and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very
+shadow of the Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.
+
+Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles
+or so away above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed
+the cog railroad, she had seen its white head turn rosy in the
+setting sun, and once when a German tourist from Munich had
+handed her his fieldglass she had even made out some of the
+crosses that showed where travelers had met their deaths. Now she
+would be very close. If the weather were good, she might even say
+a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of those who
+had died. It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when one
+has money and leisure.
+
+The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up
+the mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were
+moments when the track held to the cliffs only by gigantic
+fingers of steel, while far below were peaceful valleys and
+pink-and-blue houses and churches with gilded spires. There were
+vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed, and always there were
+tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a child in others;
+she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched him for
+comfort.
+
+"It is so dark," she apologized, "and it frightens me, the
+mountain heart. In your America, have you so great mountains?"
+
+Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood
+racing.
+
+"Much larger," he said magnificently. "I haven't seen a hill in
+Europe I'd exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the
+mountains there we use railway coaches. These toy railroads are a
+joke. At home we'd use 'em as street-cars."
+
+"Really! I should like to see America."
+
+"So should I."
+
+The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America
+was apt to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him,
+which was even worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not
+repulsed, became silent.
+
+At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left
+the train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the
+platform beer and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train
+resumed its clanking progress they ate luncheon, drinking the
+beer from the bottles and slicing the sausage with a penknife. It
+was a joyous trip, a red-letter day in the girl's rather sordid
+if not uneventful life. The Herr Doktor was pleased with her. He
+liked her hat, and when she flushed with pleasure demanded proof
+that she was not rouged. Proof was forthcoming. She rubbed her
+cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and produced in triumph its
+unreddened purity.
+
+"Thou suspicious one!" she pouted. "I must take off the skin to
+assure thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none."
+
+"You're a good child." He stooped over and kissed one scarlet
+cheek and then being very comfortable and the beer having made
+him drowsy, he put his head in her lap and slept.
+
+When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered
+above and the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near.
+They were frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were
+long lines of granite avalanche sheds. The little passage of the
+car was full of tourists looking down.
+
+"We are very close, I am sure," an American girl was saying just
+outside the doorway. "See, isn't that the Kurhaus? There, it is
+lost again."
+
+The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had
+spoken was young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the
+first time and moved to a more decorous distance from Marie.
+
+Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her
+thoughts were busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also
+and the Herr Doktor would meet her. But that was foolish! There
+were other resorts besides Semmering, and in the little villa to
+which they went there would be no Americans. It was childish to
+worry about a girl whose back and profile only she had seen. Also
+profiles were deceptive; there was the matter of the ears.
+Marie's ears were small and set close to her head. If the
+American Fraulein's ears stuck out or her face were only short
+and wide! But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once
+swiftly into the compartment. She was quite lovely.
+
+Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of
+stretching and yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not
+speak to the girl; Marie noted that with some comfort. But
+shortly after she saw him conversing easily with a male member of
+the party. Her heart sank again. Life was moving very fast for
+Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the train.
+
+Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered
+his own cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels
+together, a German custom he had picked up. The girl was
+impressed; Marie saw that. When they drew into the station at
+Semmering Stewart helped the American party off first and then
+came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than the little Austrian's
+would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape attention, once
+they were out of the train and moving toward the gate of the
+station. He stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the
+hand-luggage and picked it up again, as though it weighed
+heavily, whereas it was both small and light. He loitered through
+the gate and paused to exchange a word with the gateman.
+
+The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh
+and well up the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated
+side by side in a straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a
+robe over their knees, and a noisy driver high above them on the
+driving-seat. Stewart spoke to her then, the first time for half
+an hour.
+
+Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered
+wide over the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens,
+hidden from the roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery
+separated by valleys. One might live in one part of Semmering for
+a month and never suspect the existence of other parts, or wander
+over steep roads and paths for days and never pass twice over the
+same one. The Herr Doktor might not see the American girl
+again--and if he did! Did he not see American girls wherever he
+went?
+
+The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing.
+Below in the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue
+shadows, of cows with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of
+houses with dark faces that opened an eye of lamplight as one
+looked.
+
+Across the valley and far above--Marie pointed without words. Her
+small heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it,
+steeper, more beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset
+hue of rose was the Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation
+as he gazed with her. He reached over and covered both her hands
+with his large one under the robe.
+
+The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of
+ecstasy, leaned back and watched the mountain; its crown faded
+from rose to gold, from gold to purple with a thread of black.
+There was a shadow on the side that looked like a cross. Marie
+stopped the sleigh at a wayside shrine, and getting out knelt to
+say a prayer for the travelers who had died on the Rax. They had
+taken a room at a small villa where board was cheap, and where
+the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier sort from
+Bavaria. Both the season and the modest character of the
+establishment promised them quiet and seclusion.
+
+To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury.
+It clung to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor,
+looked out from the back of the building over the valley, which
+fell away almost sheer from beneath their windows. A tiny balcony
+outside, with access to it by a door from the bedroom, looked far
+down on the tops of tall pines. It made Marie dizzy.
+
+She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be
+unpacked and the Herr Doktor's things put away, his shoes in
+rows, as he liked them, and his shaving materials laid out on the
+washstand. Then there was a new dress to put on, that she might
+do him credit at supper.
+
+Stewart's bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and
+the draft under the balcony door; the light was wrong for
+shaving. But the truth came out at last and found Marie not
+unprepared.
+
+"The fact is," he said, "I'm not going to eat with you to-night,
+dear. I'm going to the hotel."
+
+"With the Americans?"
+
+"Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother--with
+the young man you saw."
+
+Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to
+take off the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just
+fastened and fighting back tears as she struggled with it.
+
+"Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking."
+
+"I am not sulking."
+
+"Why should you change your clothes?"
+
+"Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish
+to wear it."
+
+Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had
+walked for five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel
+he found the party waiting for him, the women in evening gowns.
+The girl, whose name was Anita, was bewitching in pale green.
+
+That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind
+once more--a perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation,
+enlivened by a bit of sweet champagne, an hour or two on the
+terrace afterward with the women in furs, and stars making a
+jeweled crown for the Rax.
+
+He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and
+opening the door of the room found her missing.
+
+She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the
+balcony and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold,
+but she was wise with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.
+
+"Didst thou have a fine evening?"
+
+"Wonderful!"
+
+"I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested."
+
+"Good, little Marie!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+The card in the American Doctors' Club brought a response
+finally. It was just in time. Harmony's funds were low, and the
+Frau Professor Bergmeister had gone to St. Moritz for the winter.
+She regretted the English lessons, but there were always English
+at St. Moritz and it cost nothing to talk with them. Before she
+left she made Harmony a present. "For Christmas," she explained.
+It was a glass pin-tray, decorated beneath with labels from the
+Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a picture of the
+Emperor.
+
+The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against
+an east wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened
+the old garden gate by the simple expedient of leaning against
+it. It flew back violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in
+process of egress down the walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer,
+clad as usual in the best broadcloth and wearing her old sable
+cape, made over according to her oldest daughter's ideas into a
+staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the path now and Mrs. Boyer
+was gasping for breath.
+
+"I'm so sorry!" Harmony exclaimed. "It was stupid of me; but the
+wind--Is this your muff?"
+
+Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to
+extract a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down
+the broadcloth. Harmony stood apologetically by. It is
+explanatory of Mrs. Boyer's face, attitude, and costume that the
+girl addressed her in English.
+
+"I backed in," she explained. "So few people come, and no
+Americans."
+
+Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this
+humble apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at
+Harmony.
+
+"It really is no matter," she said, still coolly but with
+indications of thawing. "I am only glad it did not strike my
+nose. I dare say it would have, but I was looking up to see if it
+were going to snow." Here she saw the violin case and became
+almost affable.
+
+"There was a card in the Doctors' Club, and I called--" She
+hesitated.
+
+"I am Miss Wells. The card is mine."
+
+"One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin
+lessons and I offered to come. The mother is very busy."
+
+"I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can
+talk about it."
+
+Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the
+tea. She had had no good tea since she had left England, and was
+inclined to suspect all of it.
+
+They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead,
+explaining this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door,
+here an ancient bit of furniture not considered worthy of
+salvage, there a closed and locked room, home of ghosts and
+legends. To Harmony this elderly woman, climbing slowly behind
+her, was a bit of home. There had been many such in her life;
+women no longer young, friends of her mother's who were friends
+of hers; women to whom she had been wont to pay the courtesy of a
+potted hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas or a bit of
+custard during an illness. She had missed them all cruelly, as
+she had missed many things--her mother, her church, her small
+gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau Professor
+Bergmeister might allay her longing for these comfortable,
+middle-aged, placid-eyed friends of hers. But the Frau Professor
+Bergmeister had proved to be a frivolous and garrulous old woman,
+who substituted ease for comfort, and who burned a candle on the
+name-day of her first husband while her second was safely out of
+the house.
+
+So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way
+up the stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.
+
+Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily
+engaged in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples
+Harmony had had about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to
+get them safely out of the place and to the hospital. So Peter
+was polishing the horns. Harmony had not expected to find him
+home, and paused, rather startled.
+
+"Oh, I didn't know you were home."
+
+Peter spoke without turning.
+
+"Try to bear up under it," he said. "I'm home and hungry,
+sweetheart!"
+
+"Peter, please!"
+
+Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in
+the salon and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But
+that keen-eyed lady had known him before he turned, had taken in
+the domesticity of the scene and Peter's part in it, and had
+drawn the swift conclusion of the pure of heart.
+
+"I'll come again," she said hurriedly. "I--I must really get
+home. Dr. Boyer will be there, and wondering--"
+
+"Mrs. Boyer!" Peter knew her.
+
+"Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn't it? How unexpected to find you here!"
+
+"I live here."
+
+"So I surmised."
+
+"Three of us," said Peter. "You know Anna Gates, don't you?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. Really I--"
+
+Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost
+damning.
+
+"She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken
+me in as a boarder. Please sit down."
+
+Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly
+puzzled at Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two
+single women and one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative
+strangers, setting up housekeeping together had never occurred to
+her. Many a single woman whom she knew at home took a gentleman
+into the house as a roomer, and thereafter referred to him as
+"he" and spent hours airing the curtains of smoke and even, as
+"he" became a member of the family, in sewing on his buttons.
+There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement; merely a
+concession to economic pressure.
+
+She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but
+bustling about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her
+cheeks flushed with excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau
+Professor had gone, the prospect of a music pupil meant
+everything. An American child, too! Fond as Harmony was of
+children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who walked the
+parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and fixed
+eyes through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted
+her. They were never alone, those Austrian children--always under
+surveillance, always restrained,  always prepared to kiss the
+hand of whatever relative might be near and to take themselves of
+to anywhere so it were somewhere else.
+
+"I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American
+child," said Harmony, bringing in the tea.
+
+But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the
+American child. She was not sure of anything, except that the
+household looked most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying
+to cover a difficult situation with much conversation. He was
+almost glib, was Peter. The tea was good; that was one thing.
+
+She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the
+concession of putting it on a chair as savoring too much of
+acceptance if not approval, and sipped her tea out of a spoon as
+becomes a tea-lover. Peter, who loathed tea, lounged about the
+room, clearly in the way, but fearful to leave Harmony alone with
+her. She was quite likely, at the first opportunity, to read her
+a lesson on the conventions, if nothing worse; to upset the
+delicate balance of the little household he was guarding. So he
+stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story, while
+Harmony toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the
+lessons. None came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and
+put down her cup.
+
+"That was very refreshing," she said. "Where shall I find the
+street-car? I walked out, but it is late."
+
+"I'll take you to the car." Peter picked up his old hat.
+
+"Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the
+conductors double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how
+can they when it is the wrong car?" She bowed to Harmony without
+shaking hands. "Thank you for the tea. It was really good. Where
+do you get it?"
+
+"There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel."
+
+"I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye."
+
+Not a word about the lessons or the American child!
+
+"You said something about my card in the Doctors' Club--"
+
+Something wistful in the girl's eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.
+
+After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand
+and her voice was not so hard.
+
+"That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social
+visit and we'll not spoil it with business."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I really think the boy's mother must attend to that herself. But
+I shall tell her where to find you, and"--here she glanced at
+Peter--"all about it."
+
+"Thank you," said Harmony gratefully.
+
+Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and
+through the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind
+them he turned and faced her:--
+
+"You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer."
+
+Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The
+result was a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She
+drew her ample proportions into a dignity that was almost
+majesty.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I--I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without
+foundation."
+
+"I am glad of that." There was no conviction in her voice.
+
+"Of course," went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony's sake,
+"I suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is
+not a young woman by any means, and she takes very good care of
+Miss Wells. There were reasons why this seemed the best thing to
+do. Miss Wells was alone and--"
+
+"There is a Dr. Gates?"
+
+"Of course. If you will come back and wait she'll be along very
+soon."
+
+Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced
+that there might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the
+situation was anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in
+that she had lost the anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a
+piece of her mind. She walked along beside him without speaking
+until they reached the street-car line. Then she turned.
+
+"You called her--you spoke to her very affectionately, young
+man," she accused him.
+
+Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some
+perversion of humor seized him.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Boyer," he said, "that was in jest purely. Besides,
+I did not know that you were there!"
+
+Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged
+American womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and
+settled its broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the
+cane seat. It was outraged American womanhood that flung open the
+door of Marie Jedlicka's flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka's
+sitting room confronted her husband as he read a month-old
+newspaper from home.
+
+"Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?" she demanded.
+
+Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned
+to meet domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good
+humor, or at the most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.
+
+"I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided."
+
+"Dr. Gates--Anna Gates?"
+
+"There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I
+don't know their names."
+
+"Where does Peter Byrne live?"
+
+"In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything
+to eat or do we sup of Peter Byrne?"
+
+Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom
+of Marie Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of
+the beds with the crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing
+about rooms. There was no change in the bedroom apparent to the
+eye, save that for Marie's tiny slippers at the foot of the
+wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial house shoes. But in
+some indefinable way the room had changed. About it hung an
+atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that
+soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder
+that there is a theory to the effect that things take on the
+essential qualities of people who use them, and that we are
+haunted by things, not people? That when grandfather's wraith is
+seen in his old armchair it is the chair that produces it, while
+grandfather himself serenely haunts the shades of some vast
+wilderness of departed spirits?
+
+Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was
+exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where
+the most orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no
+attraction whatever in the thing they are asked to believe. Mrs.
+Boyer, who would have regarded it as heterodox to substitute any
+other instrument for the harp of her expectation, tied on her
+gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka's mirror, and thought of
+Harmony and of the girls at home.
+
+She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less
+shocked than she had expected. 
+
+"It's not your affair or mine," he said. "It's Byrne's business." 
+
+"Think of the girl!"
+
+"Even if you are right it's rather late, isn't it?"
+
+"You could tell him what you think of him."
+
+Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living
+with a representative male had never taught his wife the reserves
+among members of the sex masculine.
+
+"I might, but I don't intend to," he said. "And if you listen to
+me you'll keep the thing to yourself."
+
+"I'll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils,"
+snapped Mrs. Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.
+
+We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand
+painful steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked
+soul. The soul was Harmony's; the foot--was it not encased at
+that moment in Mrs. Boyer's comfortable house shoes?
+
+Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on
+her car, went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat,
+and with the sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too
+indignant to be cold. He ran up the staircase, hearing on all
+sides the creaking and banging with which the old house resented
+a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria Theresa.
+
+Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her
+face hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when
+he entered. Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She
+quivered under it and he took it away.
+
+"Crying?"
+
+"A little," very smothered. "Just dis-disappointment. Don't mind
+me, Peter."
+
+"You mean about the pupil?"
+
+Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now
+more than ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had
+stained her cheek. She looked rather hectic, very lovely.
+
+"Why did she change so when she saw you?"
+
+Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might
+have said, safe things. Not one came to him.
+
+"She--she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry," he said gravely.
+
+"She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But Anna?"
+
+"She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters," he
+added hastily. "I'll make Anna go to her and explain. It's her
+infernal jumping to a conclusion that makes me crazy."
+
+"She will talk, Peter. I am frightened."
+
+"I'll take Anna to-night and we'll go to Boyer's. I'll make that
+woman get down on her knees to you. I'll--"
+
+"You'll make bad very much worse," said Harmony dejectedly. "When
+a thing has to be explained it does no good to explain it."
+
+The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As
+in the dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the
+compelling influence of her nearness. He wanted, as he had never
+wanted anything in his life before, to take her in his arms, to
+hold her close and bid defiance to evil tongues. He was afraid of
+himself. To gain a moment he put a chair between them and stood,
+strong hands gripping its back, looking down at her.
+
+"There is one thing we could do."
+
+"What, Peter?"
+
+"We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it--it might
+not be so bad for you."
+
+"But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course,
+but--not that way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry."
+
+"Not even if I wish it very much?"
+
+"No."
+
+"If you are thinking of my future--"
+
+"I'm thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you
+care a little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are
+lonely and I am the only person you see much, so you think you
+want to marry me. You don't really. You want to help me."
+
+Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny
+his altruism.
+
+And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer,
+compared with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the
+compelling motive after all, his need of her.
+
+"It would be a rotten match for you," he agreed. "I only thought,
+perhaps--You are right, of course; you ought not to marry."
+
+"And what about you?"
+
+"I ought not, of course."
+
+Harmony rose, smiling a little.
+
+"Then that's settled. And for goodness' sake, Peter, stop
+proposing to me every time things go wrong." Her voice changed,
+grew grave and older, much older than Peter's. "We must not
+marry, either of us, Peter. Anna is right. There might be an
+excuse if we were very much in love: but we are not. And
+loneliness is not a reason."
+
+"I am very lonely," said Peter wistfully.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning
+and approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere
+of mystery that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a
+good night and having taken the morning's medicine without
+argument, had been allowed up in a roller chair. It struck Peter
+with a pang that the boy looked more frail day by day, more
+transparent.
+
+"I have brought you," said Peter gravely, "the cod-liver oil."
+
+"I've had it!"
+
+"Then guess."
+
+"Dad's letter?"
+
+"You've just had one. Don't be a piggy."
+
+"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
+
+"Vegetable," said Peter shamelessly.
+
+"Soft or hard!"
+
+"Soft."
+
+This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be
+vegetable; they could hardly be soft.
+
+"A kitten?"
+
+"A kitten is not vegetable, James."
+
+"I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!" For by this time Harmony
+was his very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which
+consisted of Nurse Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna
+and Peter, and of course the sentry, who did not know that he
+belonged.
+
+"Gelatin, to be sure," replied Peter, and produced the horns.
+
+It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row
+of beds, its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if
+to add a touch of completeness the sentry outside, peering in,
+saw the wheeled chair with its occupant, and celebrated this
+advance along the road to recovery by placing on the window-ledge
+a wooden replica of himself, bayonet and all, carved from a bit
+of cigar box.
+
+"Everybody is very nice to me," said Jimmy contentedly. "When my
+father comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who
+are kind to me. There was a woman on the ship--What is bulging
+your pocket, Peter?"
+
+"My handkerchief."
+
+"That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief."
+
+Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and
+stood up before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward
+watched joyously, while from pocket after pocket of Peter's old
+gray suit came Jimmy's salvage--two nuts, a packet of figs, a
+postcard that represented a stout colonel of hussars on his back
+on a frozen lake, with a private soldier waiting to go through
+the various salutations due his rank before assisting him. A gala
+day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the little mountain
+town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if one did
+not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands
+soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet,
+who was much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy,
+caught him to her almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the
+chair into the smooth white bed.
+
+He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of
+the deer beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden
+sentry, keeping guard. As Peter drew his arm away he became aware
+of the Nurse Elisabet beckoning to him from a door at the end of
+the ward Peter left the sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the
+room. Just outside, round a corner, was the Dozent's laboratory,
+and beyond the tiny closet where he slept, where on a stand was
+the photograph of the lady he would marry when he had become a
+professor and required no one's consent.
+
+The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which
+kept the boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with
+Austrian intrigue had made him invaluable. He it was who had
+originated the idea of making Jimmy responsible for the order of
+the ward, so that a burly Trager quarreling over his daily
+tobacco with the nurse in charge, or brawling over his soup with
+another patient, was likely to be hailed in a thin soprano, and
+to stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in mixed English and
+German, restored the decorum of the ward. They were a quarrelsome
+lot, the convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling
+disputes and awarding decisions that he slept almost all night.
+This was as it should be.
+
+The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white
+coat, stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous.
+He held out a letter.
+
+"This has come for the child," he said in quite good English. He
+was obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics
+Americans who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the
+money with which some day he would marry. He liked the English
+language; he liked Americans because they learned quickly. He
+held out an envelope with a black border and Peter took it.
+
+"From Paris!" he said. "Who in the world--I suppose I'd better
+open it."
+
+"So I thought. It appears a letter of--how you say it? Ah, yes,
+condolence."
+
+Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave
+it open to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while
+the Dozent read it, silence except for his canary, which was
+chipping at a lump of sugar. Peter's face was very sober.
+
+"So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?"
+
+"Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a
+baby--went on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her,
+which is a good thing. She seems to have been a bad lot."
+
+"She comes to take him away. That is impossible."
+
+"Of course it is impossible," said Peter savagely. "She's not
+going to see the child if I can help it. She left because--she's
+the boy's mother, but that's the best you can say of her. This
+letter--Well, you've read it."
+
+"She is as a stranger to him?"
+
+"Absolutely. She will come in mourning--look at that black
+border--and tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the
+type."
+
+The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent
+twitched, as does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the
+gushing letter in his hand and thought fiercely.
+
+"She is on her way here," said the Dozent. "That is bad. Paris to
+Wien is two days and a night. She may hourly arrive."
+
+"We might send him away--to another hospital."
+
+The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Had I a home--" he said, and glanced through the door to the
+portrait on the stand. "It would be possible to hide the boy, at
+least for a time. In the interval the mother might be watched,
+and if she proved a fit person the boy could be given to her. It
+is, of course, an affair of police."
+
+This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
+imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail.
+He read the letter again, and tried to read into the lines
+Jimmy's mother, and failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy
+slept. A  burly convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear
+and the general appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the
+bed and was drawing up the blanket round the small shoulders.
+
+"I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day," said
+the Dozent. "That gives us a few hours. She will go to the
+police, and to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time--"
+
+"In the mean time," Peter replied, "I'll try to think of
+something. If I thought she could be warned and would leave him
+here--"
+
+"She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with
+him through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to
+be there for carnival, and the boy will die."
+
+Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read
+it again in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from
+it. It spoke of the dead father coldly, and the father had been
+the boy's idol. No good woman could have been so heartless. It
+offered the boy a seat in one of the least reputable of the Paris
+theaters to hear his mother sing. And in the envelope, overlooked
+before, Peter found a cutting from a French newspaper, a picture
+of the music-hall type that made him groan. It was indorsed
+"Mamma."
+
+Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in
+order, working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel--all
+in order but Peter's room. That was to have a special cleaning
+later. Next, still with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours
+with her violin, standing very close to the stove to save fuel
+and keep her fingers warm. She played well that morning: even her
+own critical ears were satisfied, and the Portier, repairing a
+window lock in an empty room below, was entranced. He sat on the
+window sill in the biting cold and listened. Many music students
+had lived in the apartment with the great salon; there had been
+much music of one sort and another, but none like this.
+
+"She tears my heart from my bosom," muttered the Portier,
+sighing, and almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.
+
+After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter's room. She felt very
+tender toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer's visit
+had died away, but there remained a clear vision of Peter
+standing behind the chair and offering himself humbly in
+marriage, so that a bad situation might be made better. And as
+with a man tenderness expresses itself in the giving of gifts, so
+with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony cleaned Peter's
+room.
+
+It was really rather tidy. Peter's few belongings did not spread
+to any extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the
+rudiments of order. Harmony took the covers from washstand and
+dressing table and washed and ironed them. She cleaned Peter's
+worn brushes and brought a pincushion of her own for his one
+extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own steamer rug and
+folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove in the
+room; it had been Harmony's room once, and she knew to the full
+how cold it could be.
+
+Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for
+the inner. She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up,
+when Anna came home.
+
+Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came
+somberly back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was
+making fast that day.
+
+"Hello, Harry," she said. "I'm going to take a bite and hurry
+off. Don't bother, I'll attend to myself." She stuffed the letter
+in her belt and got a plate from a shelf. "How pretty you look
+with your head tied up! If stupid Peter saw you now he would fall
+in love with you."
+
+"Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!"
+
+Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt
+rather better after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off,
+was busy over the brick stove. There was nothing said for a
+moment. Then:--
+
+"I am out of patience with Peter," said Anna.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because he hasn't fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?"
+
+"Please, Anna!"
+
+"It's better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it's
+superhuman of Peter. I wonder--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think I'll not tell you what I wonder."
+
+And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna's frank speech, did not
+insist.
+
+As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna's
+thoughts wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt
+and back again to Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been
+suspicious of Peter. From her dozen years of advantage in age and
+experience she looked down on Peter's thirty years of youth, and
+thought she knew something that Peter himself did not suspect.
+Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his heart-searching for
+him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony and did not
+himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup,
+revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and
+grace, a thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility
+she and Peter had assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for
+her letter.
+
+"I've had rather bad news," she said at last.
+
+"From home?"
+
+"Yes. My father--did you know I have a father?"
+
+"You hadn't spoken of him."
+
+"I never do. As a father he hasn't amounted to much. But he's
+very ill, and--I 've a conscience."
+
+Harmony turned a startled face to her.
+
+"You are not going back to America?"
+
+"Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and
+do go I'll find some one to take my place. Don't worry."
+
+The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came
+in, and there was no time to discuss Peter's new complication
+with her. Harmony and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent.
+Anna's unfortunate comment about Peter had made her constrained.
+After the meal Peter, pipe in mouth, carried the dishes to the
+kitchen, and there it was that he gave her the letter. What
+Peter's slower mind had been a perceptible time in grasping
+Harmony comprehended at once--and not only the situation, but
+its solution.
+
+"Don't let her have him!" she said, putting down the letter.
+"Bring him here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!"
+
+And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so
+obvious was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and
+estrays, banded together against a common poverty, a common
+loneliness, should share without question whatever was theirs to
+divide. Peter and Anna gave cheerfully of their substance,
+Harmony of her labor, that a small boy should be saved a tragic
+knowledge until he was well enough to bear it, or until, if God
+so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.
+
+The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly
+blind. Thus it happened that, although the night was clear when
+the twin dials of the Votivkirche showed nine o'clock, he did not
+notice a cab that halted across the street from the hospital.
+
+Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen
+feet of him, carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a
+blanket and insisting on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able
+the next day to say that he had observed such a person carrying a
+bundle, but that it was a short stocky person, quite lame, and
+that the bundle was undoubtedly clothing going to the laundry.
+
+Perhaps--it is just possible--the sentry had his suspicions. It
+is undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with
+Peter's arm close about him, looked back at the hospital, the
+sentry was going through the manual of arms very solemnly under
+the stars and facing toward the carriage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the
+Schneeberg sulked behind walls of mist. From the little balcony
+of the Pension Waldheim one looked out over a sea of cloud,
+pierced here and there by islands that were crags or by the tops
+of sunken masts that were evergreen trees. The roads were masses
+of slippery mud, up which the horses steamed and sweated. The
+gray cloud fog hung over everything; the barking of a dog loomed
+out of it near at hand where no dog was to be seen. Children
+cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
+
+During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the
+mountain with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the
+morning, the rain clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the
+narrow yellow line of the slip.
+
+Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close
+the heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the
+room was sticky and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart,
+confined to the house, grew irritable.
+
+Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender
+tenure she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither
+speech nor thought. And the little Marie's love for Stewart,
+grown to be a part of her, was largely maternal. She held him by
+mothering him, by keeping him comfortable, not by a great
+reciprocal passion that might in time have brought him to her in
+chains.
+
+And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement;
+he resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her
+unusual leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat
+by the fire, and stamped out more than once, only to be driven in
+by the curious thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.
+
+On the night of the second day the weather changed. Marie,
+awakening early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the
+door carefully behind her. A new world lay beneath her, a marvel
+of glittering branches, of white plain far below; the snowy mane
+of the Raxalpe was become a garment. And from behind the villa
+came the cheerful sound of sleigh-bells, of horses' feet on crisp
+snow, of runners sliding easily along frozen roads. Even the
+barking of the dog in the next yard had ceased rumbling and
+become sharp staccato.
+
+The balcony extended round the corner of the house. Marie,
+eagerly discovering her new world, peered about, and seeing no
+one near ventured so far. The road was in view, and a small girl
+on ski was struggling to prevent a collision between two plump
+feet. Even as Marie saw her the inevitable happened and she went
+headlong into a drift. A governess who had been kneeling before a
+shrine by the road hastily crossed herself and ran to the rescue.
+
+It was a marvelous morning, a day of days. The governess and the
+child went on out of vision. Marie stood still, looking at the
+shrine. A drift had piled about its foot, where the governess had
+placed a bunch of Alpine flowers. Down on her knees on the
+balcony went the little Marie, regardless of the snow, and prayed
+to the shrine of the Virgin below--for what? For forgiveness? For
+a better life? Not at all. She prayed that the heels of the
+American girl would keep her in out of the snow.
+
+The prayer of the wicked availeth nothing; even the godly at
+times must suffer disappointment. And when one prays of heels,
+who can know of the yearning back of the praying? Marie, rising
+and dusting her chilled knees, saw the party of Americans on the
+road, clad in stout boots and swinging along gayly. Marie
+shrugged her shoulders resignedly. She should have gone to the
+shrine itself; a balcony was not a holy place. But one thing she
+determined--the Americans went toward the Sonnwendstein. She
+would advise against the Sonnwendstein for that day.
+
+Marie's day of days had begun wrong after all. For Stewart rose
+with the Sonnwendstein in his mind, and no suggestion of Marie's
+that in another day a path would be broken had any effect on him.
+He was eager to be off, committed the extravagance of ordering an
+egg apiece for breakfast, and finally proclaimed that if Marie
+feared the climb he would go alone.
+
+Marie made many delays: she dressed slowly, and must run back to
+see if the balcony door was securely closed. At a little shop
+where they stopped to buy mountain sticks she must purchase
+postcards and send them at once. Stewart was fairly patient: air
+and exercise were having their effect.
+
+It was eleven o'clock when, having crossed the valley, they
+commenced to mount the slope of the Sonnwendstein. The climb was
+easy; the road wound back and forward on itself so that one
+ascended with hardly an effort. Stewart gave Marie a hand here
+and there, and even paused to let her sit on a boulder and rest.
+The snow was not heavy; he showed her the footprints of a party
+that had gone ahead, and to amuse her tried to count the number
+of people. When he found it was five he grew thoughtful. There
+were five in Anita's party. Thanks to Marie's delays they met the
+Americans coming down. The meeting was a short one: the party
+went on down, gayly talking. Marie and Stewart climbed silently.
+Marie's day was spoiled; Stewart had promised to dine at the
+hotel.
+
+Even the view at the tourist house did not restore Marie's fallen
+spirits. What were the Vienna plain and the Styrian Alps to her,
+with this impatient and frowning man beside her consulting his
+watch and computing the time until he might see the American
+again? What was prayer, if this were its answer?
+
+They descended rapidly, Stewart always in the lead and setting a
+pace that Marie struggled in vain to meet. To her tentative and
+breathless remarks he made brief answer, and only once in all
+that time did he volunteer a remark. They had reached the Hotel
+Erzherzog in the valley. The hotel was still closed, and Marie,
+panting, sat down on an edge of the terrace.
+
+"We have been very foolish," he said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Being seen together like that."
+
+"But why? Could you not walk with any woman?"
+
+"It's not that," said Stewart hastily. "I suppose once does not
+matter. But we can't be seen together all the time."
+
+Marie turned white. The time had gone by when an incident of the
+sort could have been met with scorn or with threats; things had
+changed for Marie Jedlicka since the day Peter had refused to
+introduce her to Harmony. Then it had been vanity; now it was
+life itself.
+
+"What you mean," she said with pale lips, "is that we must not be
+seen together at all. Must I--do you wish me to remain a prisoner
+while you--" she choked.
+
+"For Heaven's sake," he broke out brutally, "don't make a scene.
+There are men cutting ice over there. Of course you are not a
+prisoner. You may go where you like."
+
+Marie rose and picked up her muff.
+
+Marie's sordid little tragedy played itself out in Semmering.
+Stewart neglected her almost completely; he took fewer and fewer
+meals at the villa. In two weeks he spent one evening with the
+girl, and was so irritable that she went to bed crying. The
+little mountain resort was filling up; there were more and more
+Americans. Christmas was drawing near and a dozen or so American
+doctors came up, bringing their families for the holidays. It was
+difficult to enter a shop without encountering some of them. To
+add to the difficulty, the party at the hotel, finding it crowded
+there, decided to go into a pension and suggested moving to the
+Waldheim.
+
+Stewart himself was wretchedly uncomfortable. Marie's tragedy was
+his predicament. He disliked himself very cordially, loathing
+himself and his situation with the new-born humility of the
+lover. For Stewart was in love for the first time in his life.
+Marie knew it. She had not lived with him for months without
+knowing his every thought, every mood. She grew bitter and hard
+those days, sitting alone by the green stove in the Pension
+Waldheim, or leaning, elbows on the rail, looking from the
+balcony over the valley far below. Bitter and hard, that is,
+during his absences; he had but to enter the room and her rage
+died, to be replaced with yearning and little, shy, tentative
+advances that he only tolerated. Wild thoughts came to Marie,
+especially at night, when the stars made a crown over the Rax,
+and in the hotel an orchestra played, while people dined and
+laughed and loved.
+
+She grew obstinate, too. When in his desperation Stewart
+suggested that they go back to Vienna she openly scoffed.
+
+"Why?" she demanded. "That you may come back here to her, leaving
+me there?"
+
+"My dear girl," he flung back exasperated, "this affair was not a
+permanent one. You knew that at the start."
+
+"You have taken me away from my work. I have two months'
+vacation. It is but one month."
+
+"Go back and let me pay--"
+
+"No!"
+
+In pursuance of the plan to leave the hotel the American party
+came to see the Waldheim, and catastrophe almost ensued. Luckily
+Marie was on the balcony when the landlady flung open the door,
+and announced it as Stewart's apartment. But Stewart had a bad
+five minutes and took it out, manlike, on the girl.
+
+Stewart had another reason for not wishing to leave Semmering.
+Anita was beautiful, a bit of a coquette, too; as are most pretty
+women. And Stewart was not alone in his devotion. A member of the
+party, a New Yorker named Adam, was much in love with the girl
+and indifferent who knew it. Stewart detested him.
+
+In his despair Stewart wrote to Peter Byrne. It was
+characteristic of Peter that, however indifferent people might be
+in prosperity, they always turned to him in trouble. Stewart's
+letter concluded:--
+
+"I have made out a poor case for myself; but I'm in a hole, as
+you can see. I would like to chuck everything here and sail for
+home with these people who go in January. But, confound it,
+Byrne, what am I to do with Marie? And that brings me to what I
+'ve been wanting to say all along, and haven't had the courage
+to. Marie likes you and you rather liked her, didn't you? You
+could talk her into reason if anybody could. Now that you know
+how things are, can't you come up over Sunday? It's asking a lot,
+and I know it; but things are pretty bad."
+
+Peter received the letter on the morning of the day before
+Christmas. He read it several times and, recalling the look he
+had seen more than once in Marie Jedlicka's eyes, he knew that
+things were very bad, indeed.
+
+But Peter was a man of family in those days, and Christmas is a
+family festival not to be lightly ignored. He wired to Stewart
+that he would come up as soon as possible after Christmas. Then,
+because of the look in Marie's eyes and because he feared for her
+a sad Christmas, full of heartaches and God knows what
+loneliness, he bought her a most hideous brooch, which he thought
+admirable in every way and highly ornamental and which he could
+not afford at all. This he mailed, with a cheery greeting, and
+feeling happier and much poorer made his way homeward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with
+the great chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with
+cranberry eyes for supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree
+gleaming with candles on the stand, and beside the stand, in a
+huge chair, Jimmy!
+
+It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had been
+shopping and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless,
+with the shops full of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly
+overburdened. There had been anxieties, too, such as the pig's
+head, which must be done a certain way, and Jimmy, who must be
+left with the Portier's wife as nurse while all of them went to
+the hospital. The house revolved around Jimmy now, Jimmy, who
+seemed the better for the moving, and whose mother as yet had
+failed to materialize.
+
+In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her
+as the early twilight was falling in through the gate where the
+sentry kept guard and so to the great courtyard. In this grim
+playground men wandered about, smoking their daily allowance of
+tobacco and moving to keep warm, offscourings of the barracks,
+derelicts of the slums, with here and there an honest citizen
+lamenting a Christmas away from home. The hospital was always
+pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she found it
+harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be so
+much suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful,
+insupportable. Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital
+in festivity is very affecting. It smiles through its tears. And
+in every assemblage there are sharply defined lines of
+difference. There are those who are going home soon, God willing;
+there are those who will go home some time after long days and
+longer nights. And there are those who will never go home and who
+know it. And because of this the ones who are never going home
+are most festively clad, as if, by way of compensation, the
+nurses mean to give them all future Christmasses in one. They
+receive an extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,--and they
+are not the less grateful because they understand. And when
+everything is over they lay away in the bedside stand the gloves
+they will never wear, and divide the extra orange with a less
+fortunate one who is almost recovered. Their last Christmas is
+past.
+
+"How beautiful the tree was!" they say. Or, "Did you hear how the
+children sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think--of
+angels."
+
+Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting
+corridors, and up and down more twisting staircases to the room
+where she was to play. There were many Christmas trees in the
+hospital that afternoon; no one hall could have held the
+thousands of patients, the doctors, the nurses. Sometimes a
+single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment. Occasionally
+two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and wheeled
+or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
+imposing audience was the result.
+
+Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the
+seats rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk
+of the roof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was
+no other illumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing
+tree, the rows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white
+faces over white gowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the
+silence when the Dozent with the red beard stepped out and began
+to read an address--all caught Harmony by the throat. Peter,
+keenly alive to everything she did, felt rather than heard her
+soft sob.
+
+Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through
+Harmony's eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell
+away, leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the
+heart of humanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that
+might be counted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early
+days, when a heart was not a pump, but a thing that ached or
+thrilled or struggled, that loved or hated or yearned.
+
+The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast
+turning festivity into gloom. It played Handel's "Largo"; it
+threw its whole soul into the assurance that the world, after
+all, was only a poor place, that Heaven was a better. It preached
+resignation with every deep vibration of the cello. Harmony
+fidgeted.
+
+"How terrible!" she whispered. "To turn their Christmas-Eve into
+mourning! Stop them!"
+
+"Stop a German orchestra?"
+
+"They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!"
+
+The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed
+recitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for
+the patients. Then--Harmony.
+
+Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was
+joyous, she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter
+came; even the candles burned more cheerfully. When she had
+finished, a student in a white coat asked her to play a German
+Volkspiel, and roared it out to her accompaniment with much vigor
+and humor. The audience joined in, at first timidly, then
+lustily.
+
+Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the
+applause. Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought
+Peter's, and finding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to
+play softly and as softly the others sang.
+
+"Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,"--they sang, with upturned eyes.
+
+"Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht..."
+
+Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in
+which his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions
+of a Christmas-Eve in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a
+girl-woman, of a still and holy night, of a child.
+
+"Nur das traute, hoch heilige Paar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar
+Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh'," they
+sang.
+
+There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that
+night.
+
+Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room,
+which had been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully
+tended, with a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the
+bed. To him Harmony brought her small puzzles and together they
+solved them.
+
+"Shall it be a steak to-night?" thus Harmony humbly. "Or chops?"
+
+"With tomato sauce?"
+
+"If Peter allows, yes."
+
+Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:--
+
+"Fish," he would decide. "Fish with egg dressing."
+
+They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.
+
+The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent
+improvement, but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many
+and bitter were the battles she and Peter fought at night over
+his treatment, frightful the litter of authorities Harmony put
+straight every morning.
+
+The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully
+calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in
+X-ray on which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the
+coffee-house as a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter
+renunciation. Life for Peter was spelling itself very much in
+terms of Harmony and Jimmy those days. He resented anything that
+took him from them.
+
+There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was
+failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let
+bygones be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna
+was Peter's great prop. What would he do should she decide to go
+home? He had built his house on the sand, indeed.
+
+So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not
+materialized. Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote
+letters of marvelous adventure; Jimmy still watched for them,
+listened breathless, treasured them under his pillow. But he
+spoke less of his father. The open page of his childish mind was
+being written over with new impressions. "Dad" was already a
+memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes he
+called Peter "Dad." At those times Peter caught the boy to him in
+an agony of tenderness.
+
+And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
+Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for
+the privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the
+salon. All day he had strung little red berries that looked like
+cranberries for the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes
+that were for trimming only, and sternly forbidden to eat.
+
+A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the
+Portier, with a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly
+presented him with a pair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy
+was thrilled. The cage was on his knees all evening, and one of
+the mice was clearly ill of a cake with pink icing. The Portier's
+gift was a stealthy one, while his wife was having coffee with
+her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of Christmas does
+strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was
+roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came
+the Portier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle
+book that only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded
+at last there was a picture of the Christ-Child within.
+
+Young McLean came to call that evening--came to call and remained
+to worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor
+had come. McLean, interested with everything and palpably not
+shocked, was a comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had
+had bad moments since the day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the
+hallmark of respectability on the household, to restore it to
+something it had lost or had never had.
+
+She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna
+put Jimmy to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was
+extinguishing the dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean
+was at the piano, thrumming softly. Peter, turning round
+suddenly, surprised an expression on the younger man's face that
+startled him.
+
+For that one night Harmony had laid aside her mourning, and wore
+white, soft white, tucked in at the neck, short-sleeved,
+trailing. Peter had never seen her in white before.
+
+It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were
+always alert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night
+he was unusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp
+and watched the two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or
+that, the girl bending over a string of her violin. Anna came in
+and sat down near him.
+
+"The boy is quite fascinated," she whispered. "Watch his eyes!"
+
+"He is a nice boy." This from Peter, as if he argued with
+himself.
+
+"As men go!" This was a challenge Peter was usually quick to
+accept. That night he only smiled. "It would be a good thing for
+her: his people are wealthy."
+
+Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem.
+Eminently it would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in
+his well-made evening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language
+of music, who was almost speechless over her playing, and who
+looked up at her with eyes in which admiration was not unmixed
+with adoration.
+
+Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the
+room and took to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each
+time as he passed the door he tried not to glance in; each time
+he paused involuntarily. Jealousy had her will of him that night,
+jealousy, when he had never acknowledged even to himself how much
+the girl was to him.
+
+Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but
+that night he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the
+doors. Peter came in and sat with him in the dark, going over now
+and then to cover him, or to give him a drink, or to pick up the
+cage of mice which Jimmy insisted on having beside him and which
+constantly slipped off on to the floor. After a time Peter
+lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on a cork floating in a
+saucer of lard oil, and set it on the bedside table. Then round
+it he arranged Jimmy's treasures, the deer antlers, the cage of
+mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat
+in the room, his dead pipe in his teeth, and thought of many
+things.
+
+It was very late when young McLean left. The two had played until
+they stopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to
+bed. From Jimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their
+voices.
+
+"You have been awfully good to me," McLean said as he finally
+rose to go. "I--I want you to know that I'll never forget this
+evening, never."
+
+"It has been splendid, hasn't it? Since little Scatchy left there
+has been no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for
+some one to talk music to."
+
+Lonely! Poor Peter!
+
+"Then you will let me come back?"
+
+"Will I, indeed! I--I'll be grateful."
+
+"How soon would be proper? I dare say to-morrow you'll be
+busy--Christmas and all that."
+
+"Do you mean you would like to come to-morrow?"
+
+"If old Peter wouldn't be fussed. He might think--"
+
+"Peter always wants every one to be happy. So if you really
+care--"
+
+"And I'll not bore you?"
+
+"Rather not!"
+
+"How--about what time?"
+
+"In the afternoon would be pleasant, I think. And then Jimmy can
+listen. He loves music."
+
+McLean, having found his fur-lined coat, got into it as slowly as
+possible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in
+all the dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even
+then he hesitated, lingered, loath to break up this little world
+of two.
+
+"You play wonderfully," he said.
+
+"So do you."
+
+"If only something comes of it! It's curious, isn't it, when you
+think of it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and
+both of us working our heads off for something that may never pan
+out."
+
+There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not
+until after young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was
+almost word for word what Peter had said to her in the
+coffee-house the night they met. She thought it very curious, the
+coincidence, and pondered it, being ignorant of the fact that it
+is always a matter for wonder when the man meets the woman, no
+matter where. Nothing is less curious, more inevitable, more
+amazing. "You and I," forsooth, said Peter!
+
+"You and I," cried young McLean!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Quite suddenly Peter's house, built on the sand, collapsed. The
+shock came on Christmas-Day, after young McLean, now frankly
+infatuated, had been driven home by Peter.
+
+Peter did it after his own fashion. Harmony, with unflagging
+enthusiasm, was looking tired. Suggestions to this effect rolled
+off McLean's back like rain off a roof. Finally Peter gathered up
+the fur-lined coat, the velours hat, gloves, and stick, and
+placed them on the piano in front of the younger man.
+
+"I'm sorry you must go," said Peter calmly, "but, as you say,
+Miss Wells is tired and there is supper to be eaten. Don't let me
+hurry you."
+
+The Portier was at the door as McLean, laughing and protesting,
+went out. He brought a cablegram for Anna. Peter took it to her
+door and waited uneasily while she read it.
+
+It was an urgent summons home; the old father was very low. He
+was calling for her, and a few days or week' would see the end.
+There were things that must be looked after. The need of her was
+imperative. With the death the old man's pension would cease and
+Anna was the bread-winner.
+
+Anna held the paper out to Peter and sat down. Her nervous
+strength seemed to have deserted her. All at once she was a
+stricken, elderly woman, with hope wiped out of her face and
+something nearer resentment than grief in its place.
+
+"It has come, Peter," she said dully. "I always knew it couldn't
+last. They've always hung about my neck, and now--"
+
+"Do you think you must go? Isn't there some way? If things are so
+bad you could hardly get there in time, and--you must think of
+yourself a little, Anna."
+
+"I am not thinking of anything else. Peter, I'm an uncommonly
+selfish woman, but I--"
+
+Quite without warning she burst out crying, unlovely, audible
+weeping that shook her narrow shoulders. Harmony heard the sound
+and joined them. After a look at Anna she sat down beside her and
+put a white arm over her shoulders. She did not try to speak.
+Anna's noisy grief subsided as suddenly as it came. She patted
+Harmony's hand in mute acknowledgment and dried her eyes.
+
+"I'm not grieving, child," she said; "I'm only realizing what a
+selfish old maid I am. I'm crying because I'm a disappointment to
+myself. Harry, I'm going back to America."
+
+And that, after hours of discussion, was where they ended. Anna
+must go at once. Peter must keep the apartment, having Jimmy to
+look after and to hide. What was a frightful dilemma to him and
+to Harmony Anna took rather lightly.
+
+"You'll find some one else to take my place," she said. "If I had
+a day I could find a dozen."
+
+"And in the interval?" Harmony asked, without looking at Peter.
+
+"The interval! Tut! Peter is your brother, to all intents and
+purposes. And if you are thinking of scandal-mongers, who will
+know?"
+
+Having determined to go, no arguments moved Anna, nor could
+either of the two think of anything to urge beyond a situation
+she refused to see, or rather a situation she refused to
+acknowledge. She was not as comfortable as she pretended. During
+all that long night, while snow sifted down into the ugly yard
+and made it beautiful, while Jimmy slept and the white mice
+played, while Harmony tossed and tried to sleep and Peter sat in
+his cold room and smoked his pipe, Anna packed her untidy
+belongings and added a name now and then to a list that was meant
+for Peter, a list of possible substitutes for herself in the
+little household.
+
+She left early the next morning, a grim little person who bent
+over the sleeping boy hungrily, and insisted on carrying her own
+bag down the stairs. Harmony did not go to the station, but
+stayed at home, pale and silent, hovering around against Jimmy's
+awakening and struggling against a feeling of panic. Not that she
+feared Peter or herself. But she was conventional; shielded girls
+are accustomed to lean for a certain support on the proprieties,
+as bridgeplayers depend on rules.
+
+Peter came back to breakfast, but ate little. Harmony did not
+even sit down, but drank her cup of coffee standing, looking down
+at the snow below. Jimmy still slept.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" said Peter.
+
+"I'm not hungry, thank you."
+
+"You can sit down without eating."
+
+Peter was nervous. To cover his uneasiness he was distinctly
+gruff. He pulled a chair out for her and she sat down. Now that
+they were face to face the tension was lessened. Peter laid
+Anna's list on the table between them and bent over it toward
+her.
+
+"You are hurting me very much, Harry," he said. "Do you know
+why?"
+
+"I? I am only sorry about Anna. I miss her. I--I was fond of
+her."
+
+"So was I. But that isn't it, Harry. It's something else."
+
+"I'm uncomfortable, Peter."
+
+"So am I. I'm sorry you don't trust me. For that's it."
+
+"Not at all. But, Peter, what will people say?"
+
+"A great deal, if they know. Who is to know? How many people know
+about us? A handful, at the most, McLean and Mrs. Boyer and one
+or two others. Of course I can go away until we get some one to
+take Anna's place, but you'd be here alone at night, and if the
+youngster had an attack--"
+
+"Oh, no, don't leave him!"
+
+"It's holiday time. There are no clinics until next week. If
+you'll put up with me--"
+
+"Put up with you, when it is your apartment I use, your food I
+eat!" She almost choked. "Peter, I must talk about money."
+
+"I'm coming to that. Don't you suppose you more than earn
+everything? Doesn't it humiliate me hourly to see you working
+here?"
+
+"Peter! Would you rob me of my last vestige of self-respect?"
+
+This being unanswerable, Peter fell back on his major premise.
+
+"If you'll put up with me for a day or so I'll take this list of
+Anna's and hunt up some body. Just describe the person you desire
+and I'll find her." He assumed a certainty he was far from
+feeling, but it reassured the girl. "A woman, of course?"
+
+"Of course. And not young."
+
+"'Not young,'" wrote Peter. "Fat?"
+
+Harmony recalled Mrs. Boyer's ample figure and shook her head. 
+
+"Not too stout. And agreeable. That's most important."
+
+"'Agreeable,'" wrote Peter. "Although Anna was hardly agreeable,
+in the strict sense of the word, was she?"
+
+"She was interesting, and--and human."
+
+"'Human!'" wrote Peter. "Wanted, a woman, not young, not too
+stout, agreeable and human. Shall I advertise?"
+
+The strain was quite gone by that time. Harmony was smiling.
+Jimmy, waking, called for food, and the morning of the first day
+was under way.
+
+Peter was well content that morning, in spite of an undercurrent
+of uneasiness. Before this Anna had shared his proprietorship
+with him. Now the little household was his. His vicarious
+domesticity pleased him. He strutted about, taking a new view of
+his domain; he tightened a doorknob and fastened a noisy window.
+He inspected the coal-supply and grumbled over its quality. He
+filled the copper kettle on the stove, carried in the water for
+Jimmy's morning bath, cleaned the mouse cage. He even insisted on
+peeling the little German potatoes, until Harmony cried aloud at
+his wastefulness and took the knife from him.
+
+And afterward, while Harmony in the sickroom read aloud and Jimmy
+put the wooden sentry into the cage to keep order, he got out his
+books and tried to study. But he did little work. His book lay on
+his knee, his pipe died beside him. The strangeness of the
+situation came over him, sitting there, and left him rather
+frightened. He tried to see it from the viewpoint of an outsider,
+and found himself incredulous and doubting. McLean would resent
+the situation. Even the Portier was a person to reckon with. The
+skepticism of the American colony was a thing to fear and avoid.
+
+And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just
+manage alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his
+resources to cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had
+undertaken to shield a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he
+would and could.
+
+Brave thoughts were Peter's that snowy morning in the great salon
+of Maria Theresa, with the cat of the Portier purring before the
+fire; brave thoughts, cool reason, with Harmony practicing scales
+very softly while Jimmy slept, and with Anna speeding through a
+white world, to the accompaniment of bitter meditation.
+
+Peter had meant to go to Semmering that day, but even the urgency
+of Marie's need faded before his own situation. He wired Stewart
+that he would come as soon as he could, and immediately after
+lunch departed for the club, Anna's list in his pocket, Harmony's
+requirements in mind. He paused at Jimmy's door on his way out.
+
+"What shall it be to-day?" he inquired. "A postcard or a crayon?"
+
+"I wish I could have a dog."
+
+"We'll have a dog when you are better and can take him walking.
+Wait until spring, son."
+
+"Some more mice?"
+
+"You will have them--but not to-day."
+
+"What holiday comes next?"
+
+"New Year's Day. Suppose I bring you a New Year's card."
+
+"That's right," agreed Jimmy. "One I can send to Dad. Do you
+think he will come back this year?" wistfully.
+
+Peter dropped on his baggy knees beside the bed and drew the
+little wasted figure to him.
+
+"I think you'll surely see him this year, old man," he said
+huskily.
+
+Peter walked to the Doctors' Club. On the way he happened on
+little Georgiev, the Bulgarian, and they went on together. Peter
+managed to make out that Georgiev was studying English, and that
+he desired to know the state of health and the abode of the
+Fraulein Wells. Peter evaded the latter by the simple expedient
+of pretending not to understand. The little Bulgarian watched him
+earnestly, his smouldering eyes not without suspicion. There had
+been much talk in the Pension Schwarz about the departure
+together of the three Americans. The Jew from Galicia still raved
+over Harmony's beauty.
+
+Georgiev rather hoped, by staying by Peter, to be led toward his
+star. But Peter left him at the Doctors' Club, still amiable, but
+absolutely obtuse to the question nearest the little spy's heart.
+
+The club was almost deserted. The holidays had taken many of the
+members out of town. Other men were taking advantage of the
+vacation to see the city, or to make acquaintance again with
+families they had hardly seen during the busy weeks before
+Christmas. The room at the top of the stairs where the wives of
+the members were apt to meet for chocolate and to exchange the
+addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room he found
+McLean. Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary
+habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for
+a dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to enlist McLean's assistance in his
+difficulties. McLean knew a good many people. He was popular,
+goodlooking, and in a colony where, unlike London and Paris, the
+great majority were people of moderate means, he was
+conspicuously well off. But he was also much younger than Peter
+and intolerant with the insolence of youth. Peter was thinking
+hard as he took off his overcoat and ordered beer.
+
+The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as
+he saw many things. How far his love might carry him, Peter had
+no idea. It seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and
+studied him over his magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly
+the girl's position, and that when he learned it a crisis might
+be precipitated.
+
+One of three things might happen: He might bend all his energies
+to second Peter's effort to fill Anna's place, to find the right
+person; he might suggest taking Anna's place himself, and insist
+that his presence in the apartment would be as justifiable as
+Peter's; or he might do at once the thing Peter felt he would do
+eventually, cut the knot of the difficulty by asking Harmony to
+marry him. Peter, greeting him pleasantly, decided not to tell
+him anything, to keep him away if possible until the thing was
+straightened out, and to wait for an hour at the club in the hope
+that a solution might stroll in for chocolate and gossip.
+
+In any event explanation to McLean would have required
+justification. Peter disliked the idea. He could humble himself,
+if necessary, to a woman; he could admit his asininity in
+assuming the responsibility of Jimmy, for instance, and any woman
+worthy of the name, or worthy of living in the house with
+Harmony, would understand. But McLean was young, intolerant. He
+was more than that, though Peter, concealing from himself just
+what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival for
+what he had never claimed. But a rival the boy was. Peter, calmly
+reading a magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip
+of the fiercest jealousy. He turned pages automatically, to
+recall nothing of what he had read.
+
+McLean, sitting across from him, watched him surreptitiously. Big
+Peter, aggressively masculine, heavy of shoulder, direct of
+speech and eye, was to him the embodiment of all that a woman
+should desire in a man. He, too, was jealous, but humbly so.
+Unlike Peter he knew his situation, was young enough to glory in
+it. Shameless love is always young; with years comes discretion,
+perhaps loss of confidence. The Crusaders were youths, pursuing
+an idea to the ends of the earth and flaunting a lady's guerdon
+from spear or saddle-bow. The older men among them tucked the
+handkerchief or bit of a gauntleted glove under jerkin and armor
+near the heart, and flung to the air the guerdon of some light o'
+love. McLean would have shouted Harmony's name from the
+housetops. Peter did not acknowledge even to himself that he was
+in love with her.
+
+It occurred to McLean after a time that Peter being in the club,
+and Harmony being in all probability at home, it might be
+possible to see her alone for a few minutes. He had not intended
+to go back to the house in the Siebensternstrasse so soon after
+being peremptorily put out; he had come to the club with the
+intention of clinching his resolution with a game of cribbage.
+But fate was playing into his hands. There was no cribbage player
+round, and Peter himself sat across deeply immersed in a
+magazine. McLean rose, not stealthily, but without unnecessary
+noise.
+
+So far so good. Peter turned a page and went on reading. McLean
+sauntered to a window, hands in pockets. He even whistled a
+trifle, under his breath, to prove how very casual were his
+intentions. Still whistling, he moved toward the door. Peter
+turned another page, which was curiously soon to have read two
+columns of small type without illustrations.
+
+Once out in the hall McLean's movements gained aim and precision.
+He got his coat, hat and stick, flung the first over his arm and
+the second on his head, and--
+
+"Going out?" asked Peter calmly.
+
+"Yes, nothing to do here. I've read all the infernal old
+magazines until I'm sick of them." Indignant, too, from his
+tone.
+
+"Walking?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Mind if I go with you?"
+
+"Not at all."
+
+Peter, taking down his old overcoat from its hook, turned and
+caught the boy's eye. It was a swift exchange of glances, but
+illuminating--Peter's whimsical, but with a sort of grim
+determination; McLean's sheepish, but equally determined.
+
+"Rotten afternoon," said McLean as they started for the stairs.
+"Half rain, half snow. Streets are ankle-deep."
+
+"I'm not particularly keen about walking, but--I don't care for
+this tomb alone."
+
+Nothing was further from McLean's mind than a walk with Peter
+that afternoon. He hesitated halfway down the upper flight.
+
+"You don't care for cribbage, do you?"
+
+"Don't know anything about it. How about pinochle?"
+
+They had both stopped, equally determined, equally hesitating.
+
+"Pinochle it is," acquiesced McLean. "I was only going because
+there was nothing to do."
+
+Things went very well for Peter that afternoon--up to a certain
+point. He beat McLean unmercifully, playing with cold
+deliberation. McLean wearied, fidgeted, railed at his luck. Peter
+played on grimly.
+
+The club filled up toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women,
+wives of members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather
+attentive before he met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted
+bow he gave her. And, finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one
+of the women on Anna's list.
+
+Peter, laying down pairs and marking up score, went over
+Harmony's requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a
+woman, not young, not too stout, agreeable and human. She was a
+large, almost bovinely placid person, not at all reminiscent of
+Anna. She was neat where Anna had been disorderly, well dressed
+and breezy against Anna's dowdiness and sharpness. Peter, having
+totaled the score, rose and looked down at McLean.
+
+"You're a nice lad," he said, smiling. "Sometime I shall teach
+you the game."
+
+"How about a lesson to-night in Seven-Star Street?"
+
+"To-night? Why, I'm sorry. We have an engagement for to-night."
+
+The "we" was deliberate and cruel. McLean writhed. Also the
+statement was false, but the boy was spared that knowledge for
+the moment.
+
+Things went well. Dr. Jennings was badly off for quarters. She
+would make a change if she could better herself. Peter drew her
+off to a corner and stated his case. She listened attentively,
+albeit not without disapproval.
+
+She frankly discredited the altruism of Peter's motives when he
+told her about Harmony. But as the recital went on she found
+herself rather touched. The story of Jimmy appealed to her. She
+scolded and lauded Peter in one breath, and what was more to the
+point, she promised to visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse
+the next day.
+
+"So Anna Gates has gone home!" she reflected. "When?"
+
+"This morning."
+
+"Then the girl is there alone?"
+
+"Yes. She is very young and inexperienced, and the boy--it's
+myocarditis. She's afraid to be left with him."
+
+"Is she quite alone?"
+
+"Absolutely, and without funds, except enough for her lessons.
+Our arrangement was that she should keep the house going; that
+was her share."
+
+Dr. Jennings was impressed. It was impossible to talk to Peter
+and not believe him. Women trusted Peter always.
+
+"You've been very foolish, Dr. Byrne," she said as she rose; "but
+you've been disinterested enough to offset that and to put some
+of us to shame. To-morrow at three, if it suits you. You said the
+Siebensternstrasse?"
+
+Peter went home exultant.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Christmas-Day had had a softening effect on Mrs. Boyer. It had
+opened badly. It was the first Christmas she had spent away from
+her children, and there had been little of the holiday spirit in
+her attitude as she prepared the Christmas breakfast. After that,
+however, things happened.
+
+In the first place, under her plate she had found a frivolous
+chain and pendant which she had admired. And when her eyes filled
+up, as they did whenever she was emotionally moved, the doctor
+had come round the table and put both his arms about her.
+
+"Too young for you? Not a bit!" he said heartily. "You're
+better-looking then you ever were, Jennie; and if you weren't
+you're the only woman for me, anyhow. Don't you think I realize
+what this exile means to you and that you're doing it for me?"
+
+"I--I don't mind it."
+
+"Yes, you do. To-night we'll go out and make a night of it, shall
+we? Supper at the Grand, the theater, and then the Tabarin, eh?"
+
+She loosened herself from his arms.
+
+"What shall I wear? Those horrible things the children bought
+me--"
+
+"Throw 'em away."
+
+"They're not worn at all."
+
+"Throw them out. Get rid of the things the children got you. Go
+out to-morrow and buy something you like--not that I don't like
+you in anything or without--"
+
+"Frank!"
+
+"Be happy, that's the thing. It's the first Christmas without the
+family, and I miss them too. But we're together, dear. That's the
+big thing. Merry Christmas."
+
+An auspicious opening, that, to Christmas-Day. And they had
+carried out the program as outlined. Mrs. Boyer had enjoyed it,
+albeit a bit horrified at the Christmas gayety at the Tabarin.
+
+The next morning, however, she awakened with a keen reaction. Her
+head ached. She had a sense of taint over her. She was virtue
+rampant again, as on the day she had first visited the old lodge
+in the Siebensternstrasse.
+
+It is hardly astonishing that by association of ideas Harmony
+came into her mind again, a brand that might even yet be snatched
+from the burning. She had been a bit hasty before, she admitted
+to herself. There was a woman doctor named Gates, although her
+address at the club was given as Pension Schwarz. She determined
+to do her shopping early and then to visit the house in the
+Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard woman, for all her
+inflexible morality, and more than once she had had an uneasy
+memory of Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face the
+afternoon of her visit. She had been a watchful mother over a not
+particularly handsome family of daughters. This lovely young girl
+needed mothering and she had refused it. She would go back, and
+if she found she had been wrong and the girl was deserving and
+honest, she would see what could be done.
+
+The day was wretched. The snow had turned to rain. Mrs. Boyer,
+shopping, dragged wet skirts and damp feet from store to store.
+She found nothing that she cared for after all. The garments that
+looked chic in the windows or on manikins in the shops, were
+absurd on her. Her insistent bosom bulged, straight lines became
+curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets gaped, collars choked her or
+shocked her by their absence. In the mirror of Marie Jedlicka,
+clad in familiar garments that had accommodated themselves to the
+idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump, rather
+comely matron. Here before the plate glass of the modiste, under
+the glare of a hundred lights, side by side with a slim Austrian
+girl who looked like a willow wand, Mrs. Boyer was grotesque,
+ridiculous, monstrous. She shuddered. She almost wept.
+
+It was bad preparation for a visit to the Siebensternstrasse.
+Mrs. Boyer, finding her vanity gone, convinced that she was an
+absurdity physically, fell back for comfort on her soul. She had
+been a good wife and mother; she was chaste, righteous. God had
+been cruel to her in the flesh, but He had given her the spirit.
+
+"Madame wishes not the gown? It is beautiful--see the embroidery!
+And the neck may be filled with chiffon."
+
+"Young woman," she said grimly, "I see the embroidery; and the
+neck may be filled with chiffon, but not for me! And when you
+have had five children, you will not buy clothes like that
+either."
+
+All the kindliness was gone from the visit to the
+Siebensternstrasse; only the determination remained. Wounded to
+the heart of her self-esteem, her pride in tatters, she took her
+way to the old lodge and climbed the stairs.
+
+She found a condition of mild excitement. Jimmy had slept long
+after his bath. Harmony practiced, cut up a chicken for broth,
+aired blankets for the chair into which Peter on his return was
+to lift the boy.
+
+She was called to inspect the mouse-cage, which, according to
+Jimmy, had strawberries in it.
+
+"Far back," he explained. "There in the cotton, Harry."
+
+But it was not strawberries. Harmony opened the cage and very
+tenderly took out the cotton nest. Eight tiny pink baby mice,
+clean washed by the mother, lay curled in a heap.
+
+It was a stupendous moment. The joy of vicarious parentage was
+Jimmy's. He named them all immediately and demanded food for
+them. On Harmony's delicate explanation that this was
+unnecessary, life took on a new meaning for Jimmy. He watched the
+mother lest she slight one. His responsibility weighed on him.
+Also his inquiring mind was very busy.
+
+"But how did they get there?" he demanded.
+
+"God sent them, just as he sends babies of all sorts."
+
+"Did he send me?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"That's a good one on you, Harry. My father found me in a hollow
+tree."
+
+"But don't you think God had something to do with it?"
+
+Jimmy pondered this.
+
+"I suppose," he reflected, "God sent Daddy to find me so that I
+would be his little boy. You never happened to see any babies
+when you were out walking, did you, Harry?"
+
+"Not in stumps--but I probably wasn't looking."
+
+Jimmy eyed her with sympathy.
+
+"You may some day. Would you like to have one?"
+
+"Very much," said Harmony, and flushed delightfully.
+
+Jimmy was disposed to press the matter, to urge immediate
+maternity on her.
+
+"You could lay it here on the bed," he offered, "and I'd watch
+it. When they yell you let 'em suck your finger. I knew a woman
+once that had a baby and she did that. And it could watch
+Isabella." Isabella was the mother mouse. "And when I'm better I
+could take it walking."
+
+"That," said Harmony gravely, "is mighty fine of you, Jimmy boy.
+I--I'll think about it." She never denied Jimmy anything, so now
+she temporized.
+
+"I'll ask Peter."
+
+Harmony had a half-hysterical moment; then:
+
+"Wouldn't it be better," she asked, "to keep anything of that
+sort a secret? And to surprise Peter?"
+
+The boy loved a secret. He played with it in lieu of other
+occupation. His uncertain future was sown thick with secrets that
+would never flower into reality. Thus Peter had shamelessly
+promised him a visit to the circus when he was able to go,
+Harmony not to be told until the tickets were bought. Anna had
+similarly promised to send him from America a pitcher's glove and
+a baseball bat. To this list of futurities he now added Harmony's
+baby.
+
+Harmony brought in her violin and played softly to him, not to
+disturb the sleeping mice. She sang, too, a verse that the Big
+Soprano had been fond of and that Jimmy loved. Not much of a
+voice was Harmony's, but sweet and low and very true, as became
+her violinist's ear.
+
+  "Ah, well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+   Deeply buried from human eyes,"
+
+she sang, her clear eyes luminous.
+
+  "And in the hereafter, angels may
+   Roll the stone from its grave away!"
+
+Mrs. Boyer mounted the stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She
+had snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although
+that very morning she had detested the suit, her round of
+shopping had again endeared it to her. She told the Portier in
+English what she thought of him, and climbed ponderously, pausing
+at each landing to examine the damage.
+
+Harmony, having sung Jimmy to sleep, was in the throes of an
+experiment. She was trying to smoke.
+
+A very human young person was Harmony, apt to be exceedingly
+wretched if her hat were of last year's fashion, anxious to be
+inconspicuous by doing what every one else was doing,
+conventional as are the very young, fearful of being an
+exception.
+
+And nearly every one was smoking. Many of the young women whom
+she met at the master's house had yellowed fingers and smoked in
+the anteroom; the Big Soprano had smoked; Anna and Scatchy had
+smoked; in the coffee-houses milliners' apprentices produced
+little silver mouth-pieces to prevent soiling their pretty lips
+and smoked endlessly. Even Peter had admitted that it was not a
+vice, but only a comfortable bad habit. And Anna had left a
+handful of cigarettes.
+
+Harmony was not smoking; she was experimenting. Peter and Anna
+had smoked together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without
+reasoning it out, Harmony was experimenting toward the end of
+establishing her relations with Peter still further on friendly
+and comradely grounds. Two men might smoke together; a man and a
+woman might smoke together as friends. According to Harmony's
+ideas, a girl paring potatoes might inspire sentiment, but
+smoking a cigarette--never!
+
+She did not like it. She thought, standing before her little
+mirror, that she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her
+lips together, as she had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke
+in a thin line. She smoked very hard, so that she stood in the
+center of a gray nimbus. She hated it, but she persisted. Perhaps
+it grew on one; perhaps, also, if she walked about it would choke
+her less. She practiced holding the thing between her first and
+second fingers, and found that easier than smoking. Then she went
+to the salon where there was more air, and tried exhaling through
+her nose. It made her sneeze.
+
+On the sneeze came Mrs. Boyer's ring. Harmony thought very fast.
+It might be the bread or the milk, but again--She flung the
+cigarette into the stove, shut the door, and answered the bell. 
+
+Mrs. Boyer's greeting was colder than she had intended. It put
+Harmony on the defensive at once, made her uncomfortable. Like
+all the innocent falsely accused she looked guiltier than the
+guiltiest. Under Mrs. Boyer's searching eyes the enormity of her
+situation overwhelmed her. And over all, through salon and
+passage, hung the damning odor of the cigarette. Harmony, leading
+the way in, was a sheep before her shearer.
+
+"I'm calling on all of you," said Mrs. Boyer, sniping. "I meant
+to bring Dr. Boyer's cards for every one, including Dr. Byrne."
+
+"I'm sorry. Dr. Byrne is out."
+
+"And Dr. Gates?"
+
+"She--she is away."
+
+Mrs. Boyer raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously changed the
+subject, requesting a needle and thread to draw the rent
+together. It had been in Harmony's mind to explain the situation,
+to show Jimmy to Mrs. Boyer, to throw herself on the older
+woman's sympathy, to ask advice. But the visitor's attitude made
+this difficult. To add to her discomfort, through the grating in
+the stove door was coming a thin thread of smoke.
+
+It was, after all, Mrs. Boyer who broached the subject again. She
+had had a cup of tea, and Harmony, sitting on a stool, had mended
+the rent so that it could hardly be seen. Mrs. Boyer, softened by
+the tea and by the proximity of Harmony's lovely head bent over
+her task, grew slightly more expansive.
+
+"I ought to tell you something, Miss Wells," she said. "You
+remember my other visit?"
+
+"Perfectly." Harmony bent still lower.
+
+"I did you an injustice at that time. I've been sorry ever since.
+I thought that there was no Dr. Gates. I'm sorry, but I'm not
+going to deny it. People do things in this wicked city that they
+wouldn't do at home. I confess I misjudged Peter Byrne. You can
+give him my apologies, since he won't see me."
+
+"But he isn't here or of course he'd see you."
+
+"Then," demanded Mrs. Boyer grimly, "if Peter Byrne is not here,
+who has been smoking cigarettes in this room? There is one still
+burning in that stove!"
+
+Harmony's hand was forced. She was white as she cut the
+brown-silk thread and rose to her feet.
+
+"I think," she said, "that I'd better go back a few weeks, Mrs.
+Boyer, and tell you a story, if you have time to listen."
+
+"If it is disagreeable--"
+
+"Not at all. It is about Peter Byrne and myself, and--some
+others. It is really about Peter. Mrs. Boyer, will you come very
+quietly across the hall?"
+
+Mrs. Boyer, expecting Heaven knows what, rose with celerity.
+Harmony led the way to Jimmy's door and opened it. He was still
+asleep, a wasted small figure on the narrow bed. Beside him the
+mice frolicked in their cage, the sentry kept guard over Peter's
+shameless letters from the Tyrol, the strawberry babies wriggled
+in their cotton.
+
+"We are not going to have him very long," said Harmony softly.
+"Peter is making him happy for a little while."
+
+Back in the salon of Maria Theresa she told the whole story. Mrs.
+Boyer found it very affecting. Harmony sat beside her on a stool
+and she kept her hand on the girl's shoulder. When the narrative
+reached Anna's going away, however, she took it away. From that
+point on she sat uncompromisingly rigid and listened.
+
+"Then you mean to say," she exploded when Harmony had finished,
+"that you intend to stay on here, just the two of you?"
+
+"And Jimmy."
+
+"Bah! What has the child to do with it?"
+
+"We will find some one to take Anna's place."
+
+"I doubt it. And until you do?"
+
+"There is nothing wicked in what we are doing. Don't you see,
+Mrs. Boyer, I can't leave the boy."
+
+"Since Peter is so altruistic, let him hire a nurse."
+
+Bad as things were, Harmony smiled.
+
+"A nurse!" she said. "Why, do you realize that he is keeping
+three people now on what is starvation for one?"
+
+"Then he's a fool!" Mrs. Boyer rose in majesty. "I'm not going to
+leave you here."
+
+"I'm sorry. You must see--"
+
+"I see nothing but a girl deliberately putting herself in a
+compromising portion and worse."
+
+"Mrs. Boyer!"
+
+"Get your things on. I guess Dr. Boyer and I can look after you
+until we can send you home."
+
+"I am not going home--yet," said poor Harmony, biting her lip to
+steady it.
+
+Back and forth waged the battle, Mrs. Boyer assailing, Harmony
+offering little defense but standing firm on her refusal to go as
+long as Peter would let her remain.
+
+"It means so much to me," she ventured, goaded. "And I earn my
+lodging and board. I work hard and--I make him comfortable. It
+costs him very little and I give him something in exchange. All
+men are not alike. If the sort you have known are--are
+different--"
+
+This was unfortunate. Mrs. Boyer stiffened. She ceased offensive
+tactics, and retired grimly into the dignity of her high calling
+of virtuous wife and mother. She washed her hands of Harmony and
+Peter. She tied on her veil with shaking hands, and prepared to
+leave Harmony to her fate.
+
+"Give me your mother's address," she demanded.
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"You absolutely refuse to save yourself?"
+
+"From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to
+save myself from, Mrs. Boyer--uncharitable people, and--and cruel
+people."
+
+Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
+
+"Meaning me!" she retorted. "My dear child, people are always
+cruel who try to save us from ourselves."
+
+Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna's specious arguments must pop
+into her head at that instant and demand expression.
+
+"People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old
+standards have gone. It is what one's conscience condemns that is
+wrong, isn't it? Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit
+the average, not the exception."
+
+Anna! Anna!
+
+Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
+
+"You are impossible!" she snapped. "After all, I believe it is
+Peter who needs protection! I shall speak to him."
+
+She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.
+
+"And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone.
+But if you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon
+YOU, keep your views to yourself."
+
+Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy's room and
+sank on her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the
+coverlet; she dared not touch it for fear of waking him--but she
+laid her cheek close to it for comfort. When Peter came in, much
+later, he found the boy wide awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled
+heap beside the bed.
+
+"I think she's been crying," Jimmy whispered. "She's been sobbing
+in her sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club.
+It was typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr.
+Boyer was not there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms
+should be Dr. Jennings. Young McLean was in the reading room,
+eating his heart out with jealousy of Peter, vacillating between
+the desire to see Harmony that night and fear lest Peter forbid
+him the house permanently if he made the attempt. He had found a
+picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a magazine, and
+was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and really in
+love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and
+Harmony were not unlike. The double doors between the reading
+room and the reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in
+a rosy future in which he and Harmony sat together for indefinite
+periods, with no Peter to scowl over his books at them, a future
+in which life was one long piano-violin duo, with the candles in
+the chandelier going out one by one, leaving them at last alone
+in scented darkness together--McLean heard nothing until the
+mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
+
+After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was
+contemplating taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he
+comprehended after a moment that Anna was already gone. Even then
+the significance of the situation was a little time in dawning on
+him. When it did, however, he rose with a stifled oath.
+
+Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
+
+"It is exactly as I tell you," she was saying. "If Peter Byrne is
+trying to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally
+I have been there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is
+registered here at the club as living in the Pension Schwarz.
+Whatever the facts may be, one thing remains, she is not there
+now."
+
+McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage.
+He found a "comfortable" at the curb. The driver was asleep
+inside the carriage. McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and
+shouted an address to him. The cab bumped along over the rough
+streets to an accompaniment of protests from its frantic
+passenger.
+
+The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence
+that afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and
+significant. He had thought once or twice that Peter was in love
+with Harmony; he knew it now in the clearer vision of the moment.
+He recalled things that maddened him: the dozen intimacies of the
+little menage, the caress in Peter's voice when he spoke to the
+girl, Peter's steady eyes in the semi-gloom of the salon while
+Harmony played.
+
+At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean
+cursed, bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had
+been gone for half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he
+could only see the girl first, talk to her, tell her what she
+would be doing by remaining--
+
+He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a
+madman. Peter was already there; his footprints were fresh in the
+slush of the path. The house door was closed but not locked.
+McLean ran up the stairs. It was barely twilight outside, but the
+staircase well was dark. At the upper landing he was compelled to
+fumble for the bell.
+
+Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the
+salon came a glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and
+furious, faced Peter.
+
+"I want to see Harmony," he said without preface.
+
+Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when
+the bell rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs.
+Boyer's visit. In the second between the peal of the bell and his
+opening the door he had decided what to do.
+
+"Come in."
+
+McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much
+shorter as slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his
+eyes.
+
+"Where is she?"
+
+"In the kitchen, I think. Come into the salon."
+
+McLean flung off his coat. Peter closed the door behind him and
+stood just inside. He had his pipe as usual. "I came to see her,
+not you, Byrne."
+
+"So I gather. I'll let you see her, of course, but don't you want
+to see me first?"
+
+"I want to take her away from here."
+
+"Why? Are you better able to care for her than I am?"
+
+McLean stood rigid. He had thrust his clenched hands into his
+pockets.
+
+"You're a scoundrel, Byrne," he said steadily. "Why didn't you
+tell me this this afternoon?"
+
+"Because I knew if I did you'd do just what you are doing."
+
+"Are you going to keep her here?"
+
+Peter changed color at the thrust, but he kept himself in hand.
+
+"I'm not keeping her here," he said patiently. "I'm doing the
+best I can under the circumstances."
+
+"Then your best is pretty bad."
+
+"Perhaps. If you would try to remember the circumstances,
+McLean,--that the girl has no place else to go, practically no
+money, and that I--"
+
+"I remember one circumstance, that you are living here alone with
+her and that you're crazy in love with her."
+
+"That has nothing to do with you. As long as I treat her--"
+
+"Bah!"
+
+"Will you be good enough to let me finish what I am trying to
+say? She's safe with me. When I say that I mean it. She will not
+go away from here with you or with any one else if I can prevent
+it. And if you care enough about her to try to keep her happy
+you'll not let her know you have been here. I've got a woman
+coming to take Anna's place. That ought to satisfy you."
+
+"Dr. Jennings?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She'll not come. Mrs. Boyer has been talking to her. Inside of
+an hour the whole club will have it--every American in Vienna
+will know about it in a day or so. I tell you, Byrne, you're
+doing an awful thing."
+
+Peter drew a long breath. He had had his bad half-hour before
+McLean came; had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony
+trying to smile, see her dragging about, languid and white, see
+her tragic attempts to greet him on the old familiar footing.
+Through it all he had been sustained by the thought that a day or
+two days would see the old footing reestablished, another woman
+in the house, life again worth the living and Harmony smiling up
+frankly into his eyes. Now this hope had departed.
+
+"You can't keep me from seeing her, you know," McLean persisted.
+"I've got to put this thing to her. She's got to choose."
+
+"What alternative have you to suggest?"
+
+"I'd marry her if she'd have me."
+
+After all Peter had expected that. And, if she cared for the boy
+wouldn't that be best for her? What had he to offer against that?
+He couldn't marry. He could only offer her shelter, against
+everything else. Even then he did not dislike McLean. He was a
+man, every slender inch of him, this boy musician. Peter's heart
+sank, but he put  down his pipe and turned to the door.
+
+"I'll call her," he said. "But, since this concerns me very
+vitally, I should like to be here while you put the thing to her.
+After that if you like--"
+
+He called Harmony. She had given Jimmy his supper and was
+carrying out a tray that seemed hardly touched. 
+
+"He won't eat to-night," she said miserably. "Peter, if he stops
+eating, what can we do? He is so weak!" 
+
+Peter, took the tray from her gently.
+
+"Harry dear," he said, "I want you to come into the salon. Some
+one wishes to speak to you."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"Yes. Harry, do you remember that evening in the kitchen when--Do
+you recall what I promised?"
+
+"Yes, Peter."
+
+"You are sure you know what I mean?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's all right, then. McLean wants to see you."
+
+She hesitated, looking up at him.
+
+"McLean? You look so grave, Peter. What is it?"
+
+"He will tell you. Nothing alarming."
+
+Peter gave McLean a minute alone after all, while he carried the
+tray to the kitchen. He had no desire to play watchdog over the
+girl, he told himself savagely; only to keep himself straight
+with her and to save her from McLean's impetuosity. He even
+waited in the kitchen to fill and light his pipe.
+
+McLean had worked himself into a very fair passion. He was
+intense, almost theatrical, as he stood with folded arms waiting
+for Harmony. So entirely did the girl fill his existence that he
+forgot, or did not care to remember, how short a time he had
+known her. As Harmony she dominated his life and his thoughts; as
+Harmony he addressed her when, rather startled, she entered the
+salon and stood just inside the closed door.
+
+"Peter said you wanted to speak to me."
+
+McLean groaned. "Peter!" he said. "It is always Peter. Look here,
+Harmony, you cannot stay here."
+
+"It is only for a few hours. To-morrow some one is coming. And,
+anyhow, Peter is going to Semmering. We know it is unusual, but
+what can we do?"
+
+"Unusual! It's--it's damnable. It's the appearance of the thing,
+don't you see that?"
+
+"I think it is rather silly to talk of appearance when there is
+no one to care. And how can I leave? Jimmy needs me all the
+time--"
+
+"That's another idiocy of Peter's. What does he mean by putting
+you in this position?"
+
+"I am one of Peter's idiocies."
+
+Peter entered on that. He took in the situation with a glance,
+and Harmony turned to him; but if she had expected Peter to
+support her, she was disappointed. Whatever decision she was to
+make must be her own, in Peter's troubled mind. He crossed the
+room and stood at one of the windows, looking out, a passive
+participant in the scene.
+
+The day had been a trying one for Harmony. What she chose to
+consider Peter's defection was a fresh stab. She glanced from
+McLean, flushed and excited, to Peter's impassive back. Then she
+sat down, rather limp, and threw out her hands helplessly.
+
+"What am I to do?" she demanded. "Every one comes with cruel
+things to say, but no one tells me what to do."
+
+Peter turned away from the window.
+
+"You can leave here," ventured McLean. "That's the first thing.
+After that--"
+
+"Yes, and after that, what?"
+
+McLean glanced at Peter. Then he took a step toward the girl.
+
+"You could marry me, Harmony," he said unsteadily. "I hadn't
+expected to tell you so soon, or before a third person." He
+faltered before Harmony's eyes, full of bewilderment. "I'd be
+very happy if you--if you could see it that way. I care a great
+deal, you see."
+
+It seemed hours to Peter before she made any reply, and that her
+voice came from miles away.
+
+"Is it really as bad as that?" she asked. "Have I made such a
+mess of things that some one, either you or Peter, must marry me
+to straighten things out? I don't want to marry any one. Do I
+have to?"
+
+"Certainly you don't have to," said Peter. There was relief in
+his voice, relief and also something of exultation. "McLean, you
+mean well, but marriage isn't the solution. We were getting along
+all right until our friends stepped in. Let Mrs. Boyer howl all
+over the colony; there will be one sensible woman somewhere to
+come and be comfortable here with us. In the interval we'll
+manage, unless Harmony is afraid. In that case--"
+
+"Afraid of what?"
+
+The two men exchanged glances, McLean helpless, Peter triumphant.
+
+"I do not care what Mrs. Boyer says, at least not much. And I am
+not afraid of anything else at all."
+
+McLean picked up his overcoat.
+
+"At least," he appealed to Peter, "you'll come over to my place?"
+
+"No!" said Peter.
+
+McLean made a final appeal to Harmony.
+
+"If this gets out," he said, "you are going to regret it all your
+life."
+
+"I shall have nothing to regret," she retorted proudly.
+
+Had Peter not been there McLean would have made a better case,
+would have pleaded with her, would have made less of a situation
+that roused her resentment and more of his love for her. He was
+very hard hit, very young. He was almost hysterical with rage and
+helplessness; he wanted to slap her, to take her in his arms. He
+writhed under the restraint of Peter's steady eyes.
+
+He got to the door and turned, furious.
+
+"Then it's up to you," he flung at Peter. "You're old enough to
+know better; she isn't. And don't look so damned superior. You're
+human, like the rest of us. And if any harm comes to her--"
+
+Here unexpectedly Peter held out his hand, and after a sheepish
+moment McLean took it.
+
+"Good-night, old man," said Peter. "And--don't be an ass."
+
+As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean
+knew what in his heart he had known all along--that the girl was
+safe enough; that all that was to fear was the gossip of
+scandal-lovers. He took Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony
+stood before her very erect.
+
+"I suppose I've said too much; I always do," he said contritely.
+"But you know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?"
+
+"I am only sorry."
+
+He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic
+moment for him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door
+and down the dark stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax,
+after all that, to have Peter discover he had gone without his
+hat and toss it down to him a flight below.
+
+All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between
+Harmony and Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked
+during the meal of careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and
+Peter's proposed trip to Semmering, avoided each other's eyes,
+ate little or nothing. Once when Harmony passed Peter his
+coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between them they dropped
+the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns, Peter wretched
+and silent.
+
+Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from
+Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days.
+In two days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some
+one else. In two days some of the restraint would have worn off.
+Things would never be the same, but they would be forty-eight
+hours better.
+
+Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading
+aloud to him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a
+valise  for the next day's journey and counted out into an
+envelope half of the money he had with him. This he labeled
+"Household Expenses" and set it up on his table, leaning against
+his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony about. The salon was
+dark except for the study lamp turned down.
+
+Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn
+slippers and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the
+landing; Peter carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles
+on Jimmy's stand and wrote full directions for every emergency he
+could imagine. Then, finding it still only nine o'clock, he
+turned up the lamp in the salon and wrote an exciting letter from
+Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb, wandering on the
+mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and carried
+down into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because he
+stood so in loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable
+that before long Jimmy would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and,
+of course, because it had been a trying day all through, Peter's
+lips were none too steady as he folded up the letter.
+
+The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and
+closed the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to
+feel his way through the room. It touched a little sweater coat
+of Harmony's, hanging over the back of a chair. Peter picked it
+up in a very passion of tenderness and held it to him.
+
+"Little girl!" he choked. "My little girl! God help me!"
+
+He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to
+find that the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could
+rouse such a storm in him. It made him pause. He put down the
+coat and pulled himself up sharply. McLean was right; he was only
+human stuff, very poor human stuff. He put the little coat down
+hastily, only to lift it again gently to his lips.
+
+"Good-night, dear," he whispered. "Goodnight, Harmony."
+
+Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and
+supper that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither
+rooms nor pension. They came to make inquiries.
+
+The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge
+of the bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still
+lacked an occupant.
+
+Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that
+chiefly medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers
+instead of language frequently, when two or three women of later
+middle life are gathered together, a code born of mutual
+understanding, mutual disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of
+outspread hands, raised eyebrows, portentous shakings of the
+head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed
+no English to convey the fact that Peter was a bad lot. Not that
+she resorted only to the sign language.
+
+"The women were also wicked," she said. "Of a man what does one
+expect? But of a woman! And the younger one looked--Herr Gott!
+She had the eyes of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her.
+When the three of them left, disgraced, as one may say, he came
+to me, he threatened me. The Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was
+a violent man, but never spoke he so to me!"
+
+"She says," interpreted Dr. Jennings, "that they were a bad
+lot--that the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!"
+
+Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous
+hand on the other woman's arm.
+
+"What an escape for you!" she said. "If you had gone there to
+live and then found the establishment--queer!"
+
+From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to
+the door. Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously,
+was Katrina.
+
+"American ladies!" said Olga. "Two, old and fat."
+
+"More hot water!" growled Katrina. "Why do not the Americans stay
+in their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot
+from the earth."
+
+Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.
+
+"Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor
+Byrne and the others!"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Of a certainty."
+
+"Then let me to the door!"
+
+"A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says--how she
+is wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good,
+that she sent them all away. Here, take the door!"
+
+Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken
+off the dust of a pension that had once harbored three
+malefactors, and having retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into
+the limbo of things best forgotten or ignored, found themselves,
+at the corner, confronted by a slovenly girl in heelless slippers
+and wearing a knitted shawl over her head. "The Frau Schwarz is
+wrong," cried Olga passionately in Vienna dialect. "They were
+good, all of them!"
+
+"What in the world--"
+
+"And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr
+Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her."
+
+Dr. Jennings was puzzled.
+
+"She wishes to know where the girl lives," she interpreted to
+Mrs. Boyer. "A man wishes to know."
+
+"Naturally!" said Mrs. Boyer. "Well, don't tell her."
+
+Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was
+not to be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the
+Herr Georgiev, Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open
+windows, and hot water were inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings
+listened, then waved her back with a gesture.
+
+"She says," she interpreted as they walked on, "that Dr.
+Peter--by which I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a
+necktie, and that she'll be in hot water if she does not return
+it."
+
+Mrs. Boyer sniffed.
+
+"In love with him, probably, like the others!" she said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very
+early and without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying
+diagonally across his small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets.
+The communicating door into Harmony's room was open. Peter kept
+his eyes carefully from it, but his ears were less under control.
+He could hear her soft breathing. There were days coming when
+Peter would stand where he stood then and listen, and find only
+silence.
+
+He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully
+behind him and lighting a match to find his way down the
+staircase. The Portier was not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and
+to stand by while he donned the trousers which he deemed
+necessary to the dignity of his position before he opened the
+street door.
+
+Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter.
+The dawn grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The
+hurrying crowds at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his
+coffee, taken from a bare table in the station. The horizontal
+morning sunlight, shining in through marvelously clean windows,
+warmed the marble of the floor, made black shadows beside the
+heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into gold the hair of a
+toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The same morning
+light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of one of
+his shoes. Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at
+the bits of dust that floated in the sunshine.
+
+Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a
+passing thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it
+lasted Peter was a king. Everything was well. The world was his
+oyster. Life was his, to make it what he would--youth and hope
+and joy. Under the beatific influence he expanded, grew, almost
+shone. Youth and hope and joy--that cometh in the morning.
+
+The ecstasy passed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer
+shone; he still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and
+hugged it. He hunted out a beggar he had passed and gave him five
+Hellers. He helped a suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered
+bundle; he called the guard on the train "son" and forced a grin
+out of that dignitary.
+
+Peter traveled third-class, which was quite comfortable, and no
+bother about "Nicht Rauchen" signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness
+persisted as far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing
+ruggedness of the scenery and his first view of the Raxalpe, came
+recollection of the urgency of Stewart's last message, of Marie
+Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy that awaited him at the
+end of his journey.
+
+Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected.
+Love was a blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat
+back in his corner and let the mountain scenery take care of
+itself, while he recalled the look he had surprised once or twice
+in Marie's eyes when she looked at Stewart. It was sad, pitiful.
+Marie was a clever little thing. If only she'd had a chance!--
+Why wasn't he rich enough to help the ones who needed help. Marie
+could start again in America, with no one the wiser, and make her
+way.
+
+"Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!" Peter reflected.
+"Poor little guttersnipe!"
+
+The weather was beautiful. The sleet of the previous day in
+Vienna had been a deep snowfall on the mountains. The Schwarza
+was frozen, the castle of Liechtenstein was gray against a white
+world. A little pilgrimage church far below seemed snowed in
+against the faithful. The third-class compartment filled with
+noisy skiing parties. The old woman opened her oilcloth bundle,
+and taking a cat out of a box inside fed it a sausage.
+
+Up and up, past the Weinzettelwand and the Station Breitenstein,
+across the highest viaduct, the Kalte Rinne, and so at last to
+Semmering.
+
+The glow had died at last for Peter. He did not like his errand,
+was very vague, indeed, as to just what that errand might be. He
+was stiff and rather cold. Also he thought the cat might stifle
+in the oilcloth, but the old woman too clearly distrusted him to
+make it possible to interfere. Anyhow, he did not know the German
+for either cat or oilcloth.
+
+He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This
+made him vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know
+Stewart well enough to know whether he was punctilious in such
+matters or not: as a matter of fact he hardly knew him at all. It
+was because he had appealed to him that Peter was there, it being
+only necessary to Peter to be needed, and he was anywhere.
+
+The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his
+valise and started up--first long flights of steps through the
+pines, then a steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he
+met groups coming down, men that he thought probably American,
+pretty women in "tams" and sweaters. He watched for Marie, but
+there was no sign of her.
+
+He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he
+turned in at the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people
+following it, coming toward him. It was a singularly silent
+party. Peter, with his hand on the door-knocker, watched its
+approach with some curiosity.
+
+It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round
+it. Even then Peter did not understand. He did not understand
+until he saw Stewart, limp and unconscious, lifted out of the
+straw and carried toward him.
+
+Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery.
+And Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
+possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for
+Stewart, of publicity that would mean an end to the situation.
+But every inch of her soul was craven at the thought. She crept
+out often and looked down, and as often drew back, shuddering. To
+fall down, down on to the tree tops, to be dropped from branch to
+branch, a broken thing, and perhaps even not yet dead--that was
+the unthinkable thing, to live for a time and suffer!
+
+Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
+threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter,
+it had been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But
+there was this difference, whereas before he had drawn her back
+from the window and clapped her into sanity, now he let her
+alone. At the end of one of their quarrels she had flung out on
+to the balcony, and then had watched him through the opening in
+the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!
+
+Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over
+the mountain roads, seldom alone with Anita, but always near her.
+He left Marie sulking or sewing, as the case might be. He
+returned in the evening to find her still sulking, still sewing.
+
+But Marie did not sulk all day, or sew. She too was out, never
+far from Stewart, always watching. Many times she escaped
+discovery only by a miracle, as when she stooped behind an
+oxcart, pretending to tie her shoe, or once when they all met
+face to face, and although she lowered her veil Stewart must have
+known her instantly had he not been so intent on helping Anita
+over a slippery gutter.
+
+She planned a dozen forms of revenge and found them impossible of
+execution. Stewart himself was frightfully unhappy. For the first
+time in his life he was really in love, with all the humility of
+the condition. There were days when he would not touch Anita's
+hand, when he hardly spoke, when the girl herself would have been
+outraged at his conduct had she not now and then caught him
+watching her, seen the wretchedness in his eyes.
+
+The form of Marie's revenge was unpremeditated, after all. The
+light mountain snow was augmented by a storm; roads were ploughed
+through early in the morning, leaving great banks on either side.
+Sleigh-bells were everywhere. Coasting parties made the steep
+roads a menace to the pedestrian; every up-climbing sleigh
+carried behind it a string of sleds, going back to the
+starting-point.
+
+Below the hotel was the Serpentine Coast, a long and dangerous
+course, full of high-banked curves, of sudden descents, of long
+straightaway dashes through the woodland. Two miles, perhaps
+three, it wound its tortuous way down the mountain. Up by the
+highroad to the crest again, only a mile or less. Thus it
+happened that the track was always clear, except for speeding
+sleds. No coasters, dragging sleds back up the slide, interfered.
+
+The track was crowded. Every minute a sled set out, sped down the
+straightaway, dipped, turned, disappeared. A dozen would be lined
+up, waiting for the interval and the signal. And here, watching
+from the porch of the church, in the very shadow of the saints,
+Marie found her revenge.
+
+Stewart had given her a little wrist watch. Stewart and Anita
+were twelfth in line. By the watch, then, twelve minutes down the
+mountain-side, straight down through the trees to a curve that
+Marie knew well, a bad curve, only to be taken by running well up
+on the snowbank. Beyond the snowbank there was a drop, fifteen
+feet, perhaps more, into the yard of a Russian villa. Stewart and
+Anita were twelfth; a man in a green stocking-cap was eleventh.
+The hillside was steep. Marie negotiated it by running from tree
+to tree, catching herself, steadying for a second, then down
+again. Once she fell and rolled a little distance. There was no
+time to think; perhaps had she thought she would have weakened.
+She had no real courage, only desperation.
+
+As she reached the track the man in the green stocking-cap was in
+sight. A minute and a half she had then, not more. She looked
+about her hastily. A stone might serve her purpose, almost
+anything that would throw the sled out of its course. She saw a
+tree branch just above the track and dragged at it frantically.
+Some one was shouting at her from an upper window of the Russian
+villa. She did not hear. Stewart and Anita had made the curve
+above and were coming down at frantic speed. Marie stood, her
+back to the oncoming rush of the sled, swaying slightly. When she
+could hear the singing of the runners she stooped and slid the
+tree branch out against the track.
+
+She had acted almost by instinct, but with devilish skill. The
+sled swung to one side up the snowbank, and launched itself into
+the air. Marie heard the thud and the silence that followed it.
+Then she turned and scuttled like a hunted thing up the mountain
+side.
+
+Peter put in a bad day. Marie was not about, could not be
+located. Stewart, suffering from concussion, lay insensible all
+day and all of the night. Peter could find no fracture, but felt
+it wise to get another opinion. In the afternoon he sent for a
+doctor from the Kurhaus and learned for the first time that Anita
+had also been hurt--a broken arm.   "Not serious," said the
+Kurhaus man. "She is brave, very brave, the young woman. I
+believe they are engaged?"   Peter said he did not know and
+thought very hard. Where was Marie?  Not gone surely. Here about
+him lay all her belongings, even her purse.
+
+Toward evening Stewart showed some improvement. He was not
+conscious, but he swallowed better and began to toss about.
+Peter, who had had a long day and very little sleep the night
+before, began to look jaded. He would have sent for a nurse from
+the Kurhaus, but he doubted Stewart's ability to stand any extra
+financial strain, and Peter could not help any.
+
+The time for supper passed, and no Marie.
+
+The landlady sent up a tray to Peter, stewed meat and potatoes, a
+salad, coffee. Peter sat in a corner with his back to Stewart and
+ate ravenously. He had had nothing since the morning's coffee.
+After that he sat down again by the bed to watch. There was
+little to do but watch.
+
+The meal had made him drowsy. He thought of his pipe. Perhaps if
+he got some fresh air and a smoke! He remembered the balcony.
+
+It was there on the balcony that he found Marie, a cowering thing
+that pushed his hands away when he would have caught her and
+broke into passionate crying.
+
+"I cannot! I cannot!"
+
+"Cannot what?" demanded Peter gently, watching her. So near was
+the balcony rail!
+
+"Throw myself over. I've tried, Peter. I cannot!"
+
+"I should think not!" said Peter sternly.  "Just now when we need
+you, too! Come in and don't be a foolish child."
+
+But Marie would not go in. She held back, clinging tight to
+Peter's big hand, moaning out in the dialect of the people that
+always confused him her story of the day, of what she had done,
+of watching Stewart brought back, of stealing into the house and
+through an adjacent room to the balcony, of her desperation and
+her cowardice.
+
+She was numb with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, quite childish,
+helpless. Peter stood out on the balcony with his arm round her,
+while the night wind beat about them, and pondered what was best
+to do. He thought she might come in and care for Stewart, at
+least, until he was conscious. He could get her some supper.
+
+"How can I?" she asked. "I was seen. They are searching for me
+now. Oh, Peter! Peter!"
+
+"Who is searching for you? Who saw you?"
+
+"The people in the Russian villa."
+
+"Did they see your face?"
+
+"I wore a veil. I think not."
+
+"Then come in and change your clothes. There is a train down at
+midnight. You can take it."
+
+"I have no money."
+
+This raised a delicate question. Marie absolutely refused to take
+Stewart's money. She had almost none of her own. And there were
+other complications--where was she to go? The family of the
+injured girl did not suspect her since they did not know of her
+existence. She might get away without trouble. But after that,
+what?
+
+Peter pondered this on the balcony, while Marie in the bedroom
+was changing her clothing, soaked with a day in the snow. He came
+to the inevitable decision, the decision he knew at the beginning
+that he was going to make.
+
+"If I could only put it up to Harmony first!" he reflected. "But
+she will understand when I tell her. She always understands."
+
+Standing there on the little balcony, with tragedy the thickness
+of a pine board beyond him, Peter experienced a bit of the glow
+of the morning, as of one who stumbling along in a dark place
+puts a hand on a friend.
+
+He went into the room. Stewart was lying very still and breathing
+easily. On her knees beside the bed knelt Marie. At Peter's step
+she rose and faced him.
+
+"I am leaving him, Peter, for always."
+
+"Good!" said Peter heartily. "Better for you and better for him."
+
+Marie drew a long breath. "The night train," she said listlessly,
+"is an express. I had forgotten. It is double fare."
+
+"What of that, little sister?" said Peter. "What is a double fare
+when it means life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And
+there will be happiness, little sister."
+
+He put his hand in his pocket.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The Portier was almost happy that morning. For one thing, he had
+won honorable mention at the Schubert Society the night before;
+for another, that night the Engel was to sing Mignon, and the
+Portier had spent his Christmas tips for a ticket. All day long
+he had been poring over the score.
+
+"'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen?'" he sang with
+feeling while he polished the floors. He polished them with his
+feet, wearing felt boots for the purpose, and executing in the
+doing a sort of ungainly dance--a sprinkle of wax, right foot
+forward and back, left foot forward and back, both feet forward
+and back in a sort of double shuffle; more wax, more vigorous
+polishing, more singing, with longer pauses for breath. 
+"'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'" he
+bellowed--sprinkle of wax, right foot, left foot, any foot at
+all. Now and then he took the score from his pocket and pored
+over it, humming the air, raising his eyebrows over the high
+notes, dropping his chin to the low ones. It was a wonderful
+morning. Between greetings to neighbors he sang--a bit of talk, a
+bit of  song.
+
+"'Kennst du das Land'--Good-morning, sir--the old Rax wears a
+crown. It will snow soon. 'Kennst du das Land wo die
+Citronen'--Ah, madam the milk Frau, and are the cows frozen up
+to-day like the pump? No? Marvelous! Dost thou know that to-night
+is Mignon at the Opera, and that the Engel sings? 'Kennst du das
+Land'--"
+
+At eleven came Rosa with her husband, the soldier from Salzburg
+with one lung. He was having a holiday from his sentry duty at
+the hospital, and the one lung seemed to be a libel, for while
+the women had coffee together and a bit of mackerel he sang a
+very fair bass to the Portier's tenor. Together they pored over
+the score, and even on their way to the beer hall hummed together
+such bits as they recalled.
+
+On one point they differed. The score was old and soiled with
+much thumbing. At one point, destroyed long since, the sentry
+sang A sharp: the Portier insisted on A natural. They argued
+together over three Steins of beer; the waiter, referred to,
+decided for A flat. It was a serious matter to have one's teeth
+set, as one may say, for a natural and then to be shocked with an
+unexpected half-tone up or down! It destroyed the illusion; it
+disappointed; it hurt.
+
+The sentry stuck to the sharp--it was sung so at the Salzburg
+opera. The Portier snapped his thumb at the Salzburg opera.
+Things were looking serious; they walked back to the locale in
+silence. The sentry coughed. Possibly there was something, after
+all, in the one-lung rumor.
+
+It was then that the Portier remembered Harmony. She would know;
+perhaps she had the score.
+
+Harmony was having a bad morning. She had slept little until
+dawn, and Peter's stealthy closing of the outer door had wakened
+her by its very caution. After that there had been no more sleep.
+She had sat up in bed with her chin in her hands and thought.
+
+In the pitiless dawn, with no Peter to restore her to
+cheerfulness, things looked black, indeed. To what had she
+fallen, that first one man and then another must propose marriage
+to her to save her. To save her from what? From what people
+thought, or--each from the other?
+
+Were men so evil that they never trusted each other? McLean had
+frankly distrusted Peter, had said so. Or could it be that there
+was something about her, something light and frivolous? She had
+been frivolous. She always laughed at Peter's foolishnesses.
+Perhaps that was it. That was it. They were afraid for her. She
+had thrown herself on Peter's hands--almost into his arms. She
+had made this situation.
+
+She must get away, of course. If only she had some one to care
+for Jimmy until Peter returned! But there was no one. The
+Portier's wife was fond of Jimmy, but not skillful. And suppose
+he were to wake in the night and call for her and she would not
+come. She cried a little over this. After a time she pattered
+across the room in her bare feet and got from a bureau drawer the
+money she had left. There was not half enough to take her home.
+She could write; the little mother might get some for her, but at
+infinite cost, infinite humiliation. That would have to be a
+final, desperate resort.
+
+She felt a little more cheerful when she had had a cup of coffee.
+Jimmy wakened about that time, and she went through the details
+of his morning toilet with all the brightness she could
+assume--bath blankets, warm bath, toenails, finger-nails, fresh
+nightgown, fresh sheets, and--final touch of all--a real barber's
+part straight from crown to brow. After that ten minutes under
+extra comforters while the room aired.
+
+She hung over the boy that morning in an agony of tenderness--he
+was so little, so frail, and she must leave him. Only one thing
+sustained her. The boy loved her, but it was Peter he idolized.
+When he had Peter he needed nothing else. In some curious process
+of his childish mind Peter and Daddy mingled in inextricable
+confusion. More than once he had recalled events in the roving
+life he and his father had led.
+
+"You remember that, don't you?" he would say.
+
+"Certainly I remember," Peter would reply heartily.
+
+"That evening on the steamer when I ate so many raisins."
+
+"Of course. And were ill."
+
+"Not ill--not that time. But you said I'd make a good pudding!
+You remember that, don't you?"
+
+And Peter would recall it all.
+
+Peter would be left. That was the girl's comfort.
+
+She made a beginning at gathering her things together that
+morning, while the boy dozed and the white mice scurried about
+the little cage. She could not take her trunk, or Peter would
+trace it. She would have to carry her belongings, a few at a
+time, to wherever she found a room. Then when Peter came back she
+could slip away and he would never find her.
+
+At noon came the Portier and the sentry, now no longer friends,
+and rang the doorbell. Harmony was rather startled. McLean and
+Mrs. Boyer had been her only callers, and she did not wish to see
+either of them. But after a second ring she gathered her courage
+in her hands and opened the door.
+
+She turned pale when she saw the sentry in his belted blue-gray
+tunic and high cap. She thought, of course, that Jimmy had been
+traced and that now he would be taken away. If the sentry knew
+her, however, he kept his face impassive and merely touched his
+cap. The Portier stated their errand. Harmony's face cleared. She
+even smiled as the Portier extended to her the thumbed score with
+its missing corner. What, after all, does it matter which was
+right--whether it was A sharp or A natural? What really matters
+is that Harmony, having settled the dispute and clinched the
+decision by running over the score for a page or two, turned to
+find the Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on paunch,
+enjoying a delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in sight.
+
+He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room,
+where, taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention,
+shoulders back, arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he
+was making, with amazing rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces
+for the benefit of the little boy in the bed: marvelous faces
+they were, in which nose, mouth, and eyes seemed interchangeable,
+where features played leapfrog with one another. When all was
+over--perhaps when his repertoire was exhausted--the sentry
+returned his nose to the center of his face, replaced eyes and
+mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton handkerchief.
+Then, still in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving the
+youngster enraptured, staring at the doorway.
+
+Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the
+higher part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were
+many unpretentious buildings. She had hunted board there and she
+knew. It was far from the Stadt, far from the fashionable part of
+town, a neighborhood of small shops, of frank indigence. There
+surely she could find a room, and perhaps in one of the small
+stores what she failed to secure in the larger, a position.
+
+Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's
+wife to sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking
+about for a room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small
+and wretchedly furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap
+dressmaker. The approach was forbidding enough. One entered a
+cavelike, cobble-paved court under the building, filled with
+wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and swearing teamsters. From
+the side a stone staircase took off and led, twisting from one
+landing cave to another, to the upper floor.
+
+Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of
+sewing-machines, the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a
+home but a hiding-place, took the room at once. She was asked for
+no reference. In a sort of agony lest this haven fail her she
+paid for a week in advance. The wooden bed, the cracked mirror
+over the table, even the pigeons outside on the windowsill were
+hers for a week.
+
+The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.
+
+"I will have it cleaned," she explained. "I have been so busy:
+the masquerade season is on. The Fraulein is American, is she
+not?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"One knows the Americans. They are chic, not like the English. I
+have some American customers."
+
+Harmony started. The dressmaker was shrewd. Many people hid in
+the sixteenth district. She hastened to reassure the girl.
+
+"They will not disturb you. And just now I have but one, a
+dancer. I shall have the room cleaned. Good-bye, Fraulein."
+
+So far, good. She had a refuge now, one spot that the venom of
+scandal could not poison, where she could study and work--work
+hard, although there could be no more lessons--one spot where
+Peter would not have to protect her, where Peter, indeed, would
+never find her. This thought, which should have brought comfort,
+brought only new misery. Peace seemed dearly bought all at once;
+shabby, wholesome, hearty Peter, with his rough hair and quiet
+voice, his bulging pockets and steady eyes--she was leaving Peter
+forever, exchanging his companionship for that of a row of
+pigeons on a window-sill. He would find some one, of course; but
+who would know that he liked toast made hard and plenty of
+butter, or to leave his bed-clothing loose at the foot, Peter
+being very long and apt to lop over? The lopping over brought a
+tear or two. A very teary and tragic young heroine, this Harmony,
+prone to go about for the last day or two with a damp little
+handkerchief tucked in her sleeve.
+
+She felt her way down the staircase and into the cave below. Fate
+hangs by a very slender thread sometimes. If a wagon had not
+lumbered by as she reached the lowest step, so that she must wait
+and thus had time to lower her veil, she would have been
+recognized at once by the little Georgiev, waiting to ascend. But
+the wagon was there, Harmony lowered her veil, the little
+Georgiev, passing a veiled young woman in the gloom, went up the
+staircase with even pulses and calm and judicial bearing, up to
+the tiny room a floor or two below Harmony's, where he wrote
+reports to the Minister of War and mixed them with sonnets--to
+Harmony.
+
+Harmony went back to the Siebensternstrasse, having accomplished
+what she had set out to do and being very wretched in
+consequence. Because she was leaving the boy so soon she strove
+to atone for her coming defection by making it a gala evening.
+The child was very happy. She tucked him up in the salon, lighted
+all the candles, served him the daintiest of suppers there. She
+brought in the mice and tied tiny bows on their necks; she played
+checkers with him while the supper dishes waited, and went down
+to defeat in three hilarious games; and last of all she played to
+him, joyous music at first, then slower, drowsier airs, until his
+heavy head dropped on his shoulder and she gathered him up in
+tender arms and carried him to bed.
+
+It was dawn when Marie arrived.  Harmony was sleeping soundly
+when the bell rang. Her first thought was that Peter had come
+back--but Peter carried a key. The bell rang again, and she
+slipped on the old kimono and went to the door.
+
+"Is it Peter?" she called, hand on knob.
+
+"I come from Peter. I have a letter," in German.
+
+"Who is it?"
+
+"You do not know me--Marie Jedlicka. Please let me come in."
+
+Bewildered, Harmony opened the door, and like a gray ghost Marie
+slipped by her and into the hall.
+
+There was a gaslight burning very low; Harmony turned it up and
+faced her visitor. She recognized her at once--the girl Dr.
+Stewart had been with in the coffee-house.
+
+"Something has happened to Peter!"
+
+"No. He is well. He sent this to the Fraulein Wells."
+
+"I am the Fraulein Wells."
+
+Marie held out the letter and staggered. Harmony put her in a
+chair; she was bewildered, almost frightened. Crisis of some sort
+was written on Marie's face. Harmony felt very young, very
+incapable. The other girl refused coffee, would not even go into
+the salon until Peter's letter had been read. She was a fugitive,
+a criminal; the Austrian law is severe to those that harbor
+criminals. Let Harmony read:--
+
+DEAR HARRY,--Will you forgive me for this and spread the wings of
+your splendid charity over this poor child? Perhaps I am doing
+wrong in sending her to you, but just now it is all I can think
+of. If she wants to talk let her talk. It will probably help her.
+Also feed her, will you? And if she cannot sleep, give her one of
+the blue powders I fixed for Jimmy. I'll be back later to-day if
+I can make it.
+"PETER"
+
+Harmony glanced up from the letter. Marie sat drooping in her
+chair. Her eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her
+at once, but any surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in
+Peter's apartment was sunk in a general apathy, a compound of
+nervous reaction and fatigue. During the long hours in the
+express she had worn herself out with fright and remorse: there
+was nothing left now but exhaustion.
+
+Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold
+kitchen and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she
+could in the salon, and then went into her room to dress. There
+she read the letter again, and wondered if Peter had gone through
+life like this, picking up waifs and strays and shouldering their
+burdens for them. Decidedly, life with Peter was full of
+surprises.
+
+She remembered, as she hurried into her clothes; the boys' club
+back in America and the spelling-matches. Decidedly, also, Peter
+was an occupation, a state of mind, a career. No musician, hoping
+for a career of her own, could possibly marry Peter.
+
+That was a curious morning in the old lodge of Maria Theresa,
+while Stewart in the Pension Waldheim struggled back to
+consciousness, while Peter sat beside him and figured on an old
+envelope the problem of dividing among four enough money to
+support one, while McLean ate his heart out in wretchedness in
+his hotel.
+
+Marie told her story over the early breakfast, sitting with her
+thin elbows on the table, her pointed chin in her palms.
+
+"And now I am sorry," she finished. "It has done no good. If it
+had only killed her but she was not much hurt. I saw her rise and
+bend over him."
+
+Harmony was silent. She had no stock of aphorisms for the
+situation, no worldly knowledge, only pity.
+
+"Did Peter say he would recover?"
+
+"Yes. They will both recover and go to America. And he will marry
+her."
+
+Perhaps Harmony would have been less comfortable, Marie less
+frank, had Marie realized that this establishment of Peter's was
+not on the same basis as Stewart's had been, or had Harmony
+divined her thought.
+
+The presence of the boy was discovered by his waking. Marie was
+taken in and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the
+Americans were a marvelous people--to have taken into their house
+and their hearts this strange child--if he were strange. Marie's
+suspicious little slum mind was not certain.
+
+In the safety and comfort of the little apartment the Viennese
+expanded, cheered. She devoted herself to the boy, telling him
+strange folk tales, singing snatches of songs for him. The
+youngster took a liking to her at once. It seemed to Harmony,
+going about her morning routine, that Marie was her solution and
+Peter's.
+
+During the afternoon she took a package to the branch post-office
+and mailed it by parcel-post to the Wollbadgasse. On the way she
+met Mrs. Boyer face to face. That lady looked severely ahead, and
+Harmony passed her with her chin well up and the eyes of a
+wounded animal.
+
+McLean sent a great box of flowers that day. She put them, for
+lack of a vase, in a pitcher beside Jimmy's bed.
+
+At dusk a telegram came to say that Stewart was better and that
+Peter was on his way down to Vienna. He would arrive at eight.
+Time was very short now--seconds flashed by, minutes galloped.
+Harmony stewed a chicken for supper, and creamed the breast for
+Jimmy. She fixed the table, flowers in the center, the best
+cloth, Peter's favorite cheese. Six o'clock, six-thirty, seven;
+Marie was telling Jimmy a fairy tale and making the fairies out
+of rosebuds. The studylamp was lighted, the stove glowing,
+Peter's slippers were out, his old smoking-coat, his pipe.
+
+A quarter past seven. Peter would be near Vienna now and hungry.
+If he could only eat his supper before he learned--but that was
+impossible. He would come in, as he always did, and slam the
+outer door, and open it again to close it gently, as he always
+did, and then he would look for her, going from room to room
+until he found her--only to-night he would not find her.
+
+She did not say good-bye to Jimmy. She stood in the doorway and
+said a little prayer for him. Marie had made the flower fairies
+on needles, and they stood about his head on the pillow--pink and
+yellow and white elves with fluffy skirts. Then, very silently,
+she put on her hat and jacket and closed the outer door behind
+her. In the courtyard she turned and looked up. The great
+chandelier in the salon was not lighted, but from the casement
+windows shone out the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp.    
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Peter had had many things to think over during the ride down the
+mountains. He had the third-class compartment to himself, and sat
+in a corner, soft hat over his eyes. Life had never been
+particularly simple to Peter--his own life, yes; a matter of
+three meals a day--he had had fewer--a roof, clothing. But other
+lives had always touched him closely, and at the contact points
+Peter glowed, fused, amalgamated. Thus he had been many
+people--good, indifferent, bad, but all needy. Thus, also, Peter
+had committed vicarious crimes, suffered vicarious illnesses,
+starved, died, loved--vicariously.
+
+And now, after years of living for others, Peter was living at
+last for himself--and suffering.
+
+Not that he understood exactly what ailed him. He thought he was
+tired, which was true enough, having had little sleep for two or
+three nights. Also he explained to himself that he was smoking
+too much, and resolutely--lighted another cigarette.
+
+Two things had revealed Peter's condition to himself: McLean had
+said: "You are crazy in love with her." McLean's statement,
+lacking subtlety, had had a certain quality of directness. Even
+then Peter, utterly miserable, had refused to capitulate, when to
+capitulate would have meant the surrender of the house in the
+Siebensternstrasse. And the absence from Harmony had shown him
+just where he stood.
+
+He was in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body
+glowed with it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told
+him what mad folly it was, this love. Even if Harmony cared--and
+at the mere thought his heart pounded--what madness for her, what
+idiocy for him! To ask her to accept the half of--nothing, to
+give up a career to share his struggle for one, to ask her to
+bury her splendid talent and her beauty under a bushel that he
+might wave aloft his feeble light!
+
+And there was no way out, no royal road to fortune by the route
+he had chosen; nothing but grinding work, with a result
+problematical and years ahead. There were even no legacies to
+expect, he thought whimsically. Peter had known a chap once,
+struggling along in gynecology, who had had a fortune left him by
+a G. P., which being interpreted is Grateful Patient. Peter's
+patients had a way of living, and when they did drop out, as
+happened now and then, had also a way of leaving Peter an unpaid
+bill in token of appreciation; Peter had even occasionally helped
+to bury them, by way, he defended himself, of covering up his
+mistakes.
+
+Peter, sitting back in his corner, allowed the wonderful scenery
+to slip by unnoticed. He put Harmony the Desirable out of his
+mind, and took to calculating on a scrap of paper what could be
+done for Harmony the Musician. He could hold out for three
+months, he calculated, and still have enough to send Harmony home
+and to get home himself on a slow boat. The Canadian lines were
+cheap. If Jimmy lived perhaps he could take him along: if not--
+
+He would have to put six months' work in the next three. That was
+not so hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived
+on it. Also there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in
+the salon propped in a chair and Harmony playing, the room dark
+save for the glow from the stove and for the one candle at
+Harmony's elbow.
+
+All roads lead to Rome. Peter's thoughts, having traveled in a
+circle, were back again to Harmony the Desirable--Harmony playing
+in the firelight, Harmony Hushed over the brick stove, Harmony
+paring potatoes that night in the kitchen when he--Harmony!
+Harmony!
+
+Stewart knew all about the accident and its cause. Peter had
+surmised as much when the injured man failed to ask for Marie.
+
+He tested him finally by bringing Marie's name into the
+conversation. Stewart ignored it, accepted her absence, refused
+to be drawn.
+
+That was at first. During the day, however, as he gained
+strength, he grew restless and uneasy. As the time approached for
+Peter to leave, he was clearly struggling with himself. The
+landlady had agreed to care for him and was bustling about the
+room. During one of her absences he turned to Peter.
+
+"I suppose Marie hasn't been round?"
+
+"She came back last night."
+
+"Did she tell you?"
+
+"Yes, poor child."
+
+"She's a devil!" Stewart said, and lay silent. Then: "I saw her
+shoot that thing out in front of us, but there was no time--Where
+is she now?"
+
+"Marie? I sent her to Vienna."
+
+Stewart fell back, relieved, not even curious.
+
+"Thank Heaven for that!" he said. "I don't want to see her again.
+I'd do something I'd be sorry for. The kindest thing to say for
+her is that she was not sane."
+
+"No," said Peter gravely, "she was hardly sane."
+
+Stewart caught his steady gaze and glanced away. For him Marie's
+little tragedy had been written and erased. He would forget it
+magnanimously. He had divided what he had with her, and she had
+repaid him by attempting his life. And not only his life, but
+Anita's. Peter followed his line of reasoning easily.
+
+"It's quite a frequent complication, Stewart," he said, "but
+every man to whom it happens regards himself more or less as a
+victim. She fell in love with you, that's all. Her conduct is
+contrary to the ethics of the game, but she's been playing poor
+cards all along."
+
+"Where is she?"
+
+"That doesn't matter, does it?"
+
+Stewart had lain back and closed his eyes. No, it didn't matter.
+A sense of great relief overwhelmed him. Marie was gone,
+frightened into hiding. It was as if a band that had been about
+him was suddenly loosed: he breathed deep, he threw out his arms
+and laughed from sheer reaction. Then, catching Peter's not
+particularly approving eyes, he colored.
+
+"Good Lord, Peter!" he said, "you don't know what I've gone
+through with that little devil. And now she's gone!" He glanced
+round the disordered room, where bandages and medicines crowded
+toilet articles on the dressing-table, where one of Marie's small
+slippers still lay where it had fallen under the foot of the bed,
+where her rosary still hung over the corner of the table. "Ring
+for the maid, Peter, will you! I've got to get this junk out of
+here. Some of Anita's people may come."
+
+During that afternoon ride, while the train clump-clumped down
+the mountains, Peter thought of all this. Some of Marie's "junk"
+was in his bag; her rosary lay in his breastpocket, along with
+the pin he had sent her at Christmas. Peter happened on it, still
+in its box, which looked as if it had been cried over. He had
+brought it with him. He admired it very much, and it had cost
+money he could ill afford to spend.
+
+It was late when the train drew into the station. Peter,
+encumbered with Marie's luggage and his own, lowered his window
+and added his voice to the chorus of plaintive calls: "Portier!
+Portier!" they shouted. "Portier!" bawled Peter.
+
+He was obliged to resort to the extravagance of a taxicab.
+Possibly a fiacre would have done as well, but it cost almost as
+much and was slower. Moments counted now: a second was an hour,
+an hour a decade. For he was on his way to Harmony. Extravagance
+became recklessness. As soon die for a sheep as a lamb! He
+stopped the taxicab and bought a bunch of  violets, stopped again
+and bought lilies of the valley to combine with the violets, went
+out of his way to the American grocery and bought a jar of
+preserved fruit.
+
+By that time he was laden. The jar of preserves hung in one
+shabby pocket, Marie's rosary dangled from another; the violets
+were buttoned under his overcoat against the cold.
+
+At the very last he held the taxi an extra moment and darted into
+the delicatessen shop across the Siebensternstrasse. From there,
+standing inside the doorway, he could see the lights in the salon
+across the way, the glow of his lamp, the flicker that was the
+fire. Peter whistled, stamped his cold feet, quite neglected--in
+spite of repeated warnings from Harmony--to watch the Herr
+Schenkenkaufer weigh the cheese, accepted without a glance a
+ten-Kronen piece with a hole in it.
+
+"And how is the child to-day?" asked the Herr Schenkenkaufer,
+covering the defective gold piece with conversation.
+
+"I do not know; I have been away," said Peter. He almost sang it.
+
+"All is well or I would have heard. Wilhelm the Portier was but
+just now here."
+
+"All well, of course," sang Peter, eyes on the comfortable Floor
+of his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. "Auf wiedersehen,
+Herr Schenkenkaufer."
+
+"Auf wiedersehen, Herr Doktor."
+
+Violets, lilies-of-the-valley, cheese, rosary, luggage--thus
+Peter climbed the stairs. The Portier wished to assist him, but
+Peter declined. The Portier was noisy. There was to be a moment
+when Peter, having admitted himself with extreme caution, would
+present himself without so much as a creak to betray him, would
+stand in a doorway until some one, Harmony perhaps--ah,
+Peter!--would turn and see him. She had a way of putting one
+slender hand over her heart when she was startled.
+
+Peter put down the jar of preserved peaches outside. It was to be
+a second surprise. Also he put down the flowers; they were to be
+brought in last of all. One surprise after another is a
+cumulative happiness. Peter did not wish to swallow all his cake
+in one bite.
+
+For once he did not slam the outer door, although he very nearly
+did, and only caught it at the cost of a bruised finger. Inside
+he listened. There was no clatter of dishes, no scurrying back
+and forth from table to stove in the final excitement of dishing
+up. There was, however, a highly agreeable odor of stewing
+chicken, a crisp smell of baking biscuit.
+
+In the darkened hall Peter had to pause to steady himself. For he
+had a sudden mad impulse to shout Harmony's name, to hold out his
+arms, to call her to him there in the warm darkness, and when she
+had come, to catch her to him, to tell his love in one long
+embrace, his arms about her, his rough cheek against her soft
+one. No wonder he grew somewhat dizzy and had to pull himself
+together.
+
+The silence rather surprised him, until he recalled that Harmony
+was probably sewing in the salon, as she did sometimes when
+dinner was ready to serve. The boy was asleep, no doubt. He stole
+along on tiptoe, hardly breathing, to the first doorway, which
+was Jimmy's.
+
+Jimmy was asleep. Round him were the pink and yellow and white
+flower fairies with violet heads. Peter saw them and smiled.
+Then, his eyes growing accustomed to the light, he saw Marie,
+face down on the floor, her head on her arms. Still as she was,
+Peter knew she was not sleeping, only fighting her battle over
+again and losing.
+
+Some of the joyousness of his return fled from Peter, never to
+come back. The two silent figures were too close to tragedy.
+Peter, with a long breath, stole past the door and on to the
+salon. No Harmony there, but the great room was warm and cheery.
+The table was drawn near the stove and laid for Abendessen. The
+white porcelain coffee-pot had boiled and extinguished itself,
+according to its method, and now gently steamed.
+
+On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted
+but burning low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little
+money--almost all he had left Harmony when he went away.
+
+Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
+discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the
+rooms revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at
+last the fact stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter
+refused to accept it. He sat for a half-hour or even more by the
+fire in the salon, obstinately refusing to believe she was gone,
+keeping the supper warm against her return. He did not think or
+reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing, hardly moving, save
+when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he was all
+alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
+outer door.
+
+The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by
+alarm. During all the time that followed, that condition
+persisted, fright, almost terror. Harmony alone in the city, 
+helpless, dependent, poverty-stricken. Harmony seeking employment
+under conditions Peter knew too well. But with his alarm came
+rage.
+
+Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
+gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the
+frightened Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation
+after accusation against some unnamed woman to whom he applied
+epithets that Marie's English luckily did not comprehend. Not a
+particularly heroic figure was Peter that night: a frantic,
+disheveled individual, before whom the Portier cowered, who
+struggled back to sanity through a berserk haze and was liable to
+swift relapses into fury again.
+
+To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be
+Peter's for many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim
+determination to keep on searching.
+
+There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the
+cabstands in the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The
+delicatessen seller had seen her go out that afternoon with a
+bundle and return without it. She had been gone only an hour or
+so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that she might have found a
+haven in the neighborhood--until he recalled the parcel-post.
+
+One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief,
+but she had also offered the girl a home. She might be at the
+Boyers'. Peter, flinging on a hat and without his overcoat, went
+to the Boyers'. Time was valuable, and he had wasted an hour, two
+hours, in useless rage. So he took a taxicab, and being by this
+time utterly reckless of cost let it stand while he interviewed
+the Boyers.
+
+Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring.
+Peter was past explanation or ceremonial.
+
+"Is Harmony here?" he demanded.
+
+"Harmony?"
+
+"Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing."
+
+"Come in," said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. "I
+don't know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer."
+
+During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the
+bedroom, and for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter
+suffered the tortures of the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had
+meant to say by way of protest at the intrusion on the sacred
+privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died in her throat. Her
+plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps with guilt.
+Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet story;
+Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her
+unstayed figure, listened.
+
+"I thought," finished Peter, "that since you had offered her a
+refuge--from me--she might have come here."
+
+"I offered her a refuge--before I had been to the Pension
+Schwarz."
+
+"Ah!" said Peter slowly. "And what about the Pension Schwarz?"
+
+"Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am
+obliged to say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the
+girl come here I could hardly--Frank, I will speak!--I could
+hardly have taken her in."
+
+Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling
+out into the hall again. There he thought of something to say in
+reply, repudiation, thought better of it, started down the
+stairs.
+
+Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he
+put his hand on Peter's shoulder. "You know, old man, I don't
+believe that. These women--"
+
+"I know," said Peter simply. "Thank you. Good-night."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean,
+from Mrs. Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing
+herself, to cutting the threads that bound her to the life in the
+Siebensternstrasse. She had drawn all her money, as Peter
+discovered later. The discovery caused him even more acute
+anxiety. The city was full of thieves; poverty and its companion,
+crime, lurked on every shadowy staircase of the barracklike
+houses, or peered, red-eyed, from every alleyway.
+
+And into this city of contrasts--of gray women of the night
+hugging gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with
+loathsome gestures, of smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths
+under great mustaches, of dapper soldiers to whom the young girl
+unattended was potential prey, into this night city of terror,
+this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine rubbing elbows with
+frost-nipped flesh, destitution sauntering along the fashionable
+Prater for lack of shelter, gilt wheels of royalty and yellow
+wheels of courtesans--Harmony had ventured alone for the second
+time.
+
+And this time there was no Peter Byrne to accost her cheerily in
+the twilight and win her by sheer friendliness. She was alone.
+Her funds were lower, much lower. And something else had
+gone--her faith. Mrs. Boyer had seen to that. In the autumn
+Harmony had faced the city clear-eyed and unafraid; now she
+feared it, met it with averted eyes, alas! understood it.
+
+It was not the Harmony who had bade a brave farewell to Scatchy
+and the Big Soprano in the station who fled to her refuge on the
+upper floor of the house in the Wollbadgasse. This was a hunted
+creature, alternately flushed and pale, who locked her door
+behind her before she took off her hat, and who, having taken off
+her hat and surveyed her hiding-place with tragic eyes, fell
+suddenly to trembling, alone there in the gaslight.
+
+She had had no plans beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to
+think the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing
+to eat, and the single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no
+German. The dressmaker had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not
+know where to find a restaurant, was afraid to trust herself to
+the streets alone. She went to bed supperless, with a tiny
+picture of Peter and Jimmy and the wooden sentry under her cheek.
+
+The pigeons, cooing on the window-sill, wakened her early. She
+was confused at first, got up to see if Jimmy had thrown off his
+blankets, and wakened to full consciousness with the sickening
+realization that Jimmy was not there.
+
+The dressmaker, whose name was Monia Reiff, slept late after her
+evening out. Harmony, collapsing with hunger and faintness,
+waited as long as she could. Then she put on her things
+desperately and ventured out. Surely at this hour Peter would not
+be searching, and even if he were he would never think of the
+sixteenth district. He would make inquiries, of course--the
+Pension Schwarz, Boyers', the master's.
+
+The breakfast brought back her strength and the morning air gave
+her confidence. The district, too, was less formidable than the
+neighborhood of the Karntnerstrasse and the Graben. The shops
+were smaller. The windows exhibited cheaper goods. There was a
+sort of family atmosphere about many of them; the head of the
+establishment in the doorway, the wife at the cashier's desk,
+daughters, cousins, nieces behind the wooden counters. The
+shopkeepers were approachable, instead of familiar. Harmony met
+no rebuffs, was respectfully greeted and cheerfully listened to.
+In many cases the application ended in a general consultation,
+shopkeeper, wife, daughters, nieces, slim clerks with tiny
+mustaches. She got addresses, followed them up, more
+consultations, more addresses, but no work. The reason dawned on
+her after a day of tramping, during which she kept carefully away
+from that part of the city where Peter might be searching for
+her.
+
+The fact was, of course, that her knowledge of English was her
+sole asset as a clerk. And there were few English and no tourists
+in the sixteenth district. She was marketing a commodity for
+which there was no demand.
+
+She lunched at a Konditorei, more to rest her tired body than
+because she needed food. The afternoon was as the morning. At six
+o'clock, long after the midwinter darkness had fallen, she
+stumbled back to the Wollbadgasse and up the whitewashed
+staircase.
+
+She had a shock at the second landing. A man had stepped into the
+angle to let her pass. A gasjet dared over his head, and she
+recognized the short heavy figure and ardent eyes of Georgiev.
+She had her veil down luckily, and he gave no sign of
+recognition. She passed on, and she heard him a second later
+descending. But there had been something reminiscent after all in
+her figure and carriage. The little Georgiev paused, halfway
+down, and thought a moment. It was impossible, of course. All
+women reminded him of the American. Had he not, only the day
+before, followed for two city blocks a woman old enough to be his
+mother, merely because she carried a violin case? But there was
+something about the girl he had just passed--Bah!
+
+A bad week for Harmony followed, a week of weary days and
+restless nights when she slept only to dream of Peter--of his
+hurt and incredulous eyes when he found she had gone; of
+Jimmy--that he needed her, was worse, was dying. More than once
+she heard him sobbing and wakened to the cooing of the pigeons on
+the window-sill. She grew thin and sunken-eyed; took to dividing
+her small hoard, half of it with her, half under the carpet, so
+that in case of accident all would not be gone.
+
+This, as it happened, was serious. One day, the sixth, she came
+back wet to the skin from an all-day rain, to find that the
+carpet bank had been looted. There was no clue. The stolid
+Hungarian, startled out of her lethargy, protested innocence; the
+little dressmaker, who seemed honest and friendly, wept in sheer
+sympathy. The fact remained--half the small hoard was gone.
+
+Two days more, a Sunday and a Monday. On Sunday Harmony played,
+and Georgiev in the room below, translating into cipher a recent
+conference between the Austrian Minister of War and the German
+Ambassador, put aside his work and listened. She played, as once
+before she had played when life seemed sad and tragic, the
+"Humoresque." Georgiev, hands behind his head and eyes upturned,
+was back in the Pension Schwarz that night months ago when
+Harmony played the "Humoresque" and Peter stooped outside her
+door. The little Bulgarian sighed and dreamed.
+
+Harmony, a little sadder, a little more forlorn each day, pursued
+her hopeless quest. She ventured into the heart of the Stadt and
+paid a part of her remaining money to an employment bureau, to
+teach English or violin, whichever offered, or even both. After
+she had paid they told her it would be difficult, almost
+impossible without references. She had another narrow escape as
+she was leaving. She almost collided with Olga, the chambermaid,
+who, having clashed for the last time with Katrina, was seeking
+new employment. On another occasion she saw Marie in the crowd
+and was obsessed with a longing to call to her, to ask for Peter,
+for Jimmy. That meeting took the heart out of the girl. Marie was
+white and weary--perhaps the boy was worse. Perhaps Peter--Her
+heart contracted. But that was absurd, of course, Peter was
+always well and strong.
+
+Two things occurred that week, one unexpected, the other
+inevitable. The unexpected occurrence was that Monia Reiff,
+finding Harmony being pressed for work, offered the girl a
+situation. The wage was small, but she could live on it.
+
+The inevitable was that she met Georgiev on the stairs without
+her veil.
+
+It was the first day in the workroom. The apprentices were
+carrying home boxes for a ball that night. Thread was needed, and
+quickly. Harmony, who did odds and ends of sewing, was most
+easily spared. She slipped on her jacket and hat and ran down to
+the shop near by.
+
+It was on the return that she met Georgiev coming down. The
+afternoon was dark and the staircase unlighted. In the gloom one
+face was as another. Georgiev, listening intently, hearing
+footsteps, drew back into the embrasure of a window and waited.
+His swarthy face was tense, expectant. As the steps drew near,
+were light feminine instead of stealthy, the little spy relaxed
+somewhat. But still he waited, crouched.
+
+It was a second before he recognized Harmony, another instant
+before he realized his good fortune. She had almost passed. He
+put out an unsteady hand.
+
+"Fraulein!"
+
+"Herr Georgiev!"
+
+The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes
+gleamed. He struggled against the barrier of language, broke out
+in passionate Bulgar, switched to German punctuated with an
+English word here and there. Made intelligible, it was that he
+had found her at last. Harmony held her spools of thread and
+waited for the storm of languages to subside. Then:--
+
+"But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev."
+
+"No?"
+
+Harmony colored.
+
+"I am--am hiding," she explained. "Something very uncomfortable
+happened and I came here. Please don't say you have seen me."
+
+Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly,
+with his ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed
+of course. His incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had
+actually been in the same building with him while he sought her
+everywhere else.
+
+"Then," he said at last, "it was you who played Sunday."
+
+"I surely."
+
+She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.
+
+"Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?"
+
+"We shall meet again, of course."
+
+"Fraulein,--with all respect,--sometime perhaps you will walk out
+with me?"
+
+"I am very busy all day."
+
+"At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect,
+Fraulein!"
+
+Harmony was touched.
+
+"Sometime," she consented. And then impulsively: "I am very
+lonely, Herr Georgiev."
+
+She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and
+kissed it reverently. The Herr Georgiev's father was a nobleman
+in his own country, and all the little spy's training had been to
+make of a girl in Harmony's situation lawful prey. But in the
+spy's glowing heart there was nothing for Harmony to fear. She
+knew it. He stood, hat in hand, while she went up the staircase.
+Then:--
+
+"Fraulein!" anxiously.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours
+hat?"
+
+"I saw no one there."
+
+"I thank you, Fraulein."
+
+He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows,
+listened until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he
+clapped his hat on his head and made his cautious way down to the
+street. There was no man in a green velours hat below, but the
+little spy had an uneasy feeling that eyes watched him,
+nevertheless. Life was growing complicated for the Herr Georgiev.
+
+Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a
+life she had never touched before. She discovered, after a day or
+two in the work-room, that Monia Reiff's business lay almost
+altogether among the demi-monde. The sewing-girls, of Marie's
+type many of them, found in the customers endless topics of
+conversation. Some things Harmony was spared, much of the talk
+being in dialect. But a great deal of it she understood, and she
+learned much that was not spoken. They talked freely of the
+women, their clothes, and they talked a great deal about a
+newcomer, an American dancer, for whom Monia was making an
+elaborate outfit. The American's name was Lillian Le Grande. She
+was dancing at one of the variety theaters.
+
+Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman--a gold
+brocade slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of
+bodice made of gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with
+Georgiev she met her.
+
+There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping.
+Monia, flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and
+glanced over the girls. She singled out Harmony finally and
+called her.
+
+"Come and put on the American's gown," she ordered. "She
+wishes--Heaven knows what she wishes!"
+
+Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein
+Le Grande had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when
+she found herself obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one
+terrible moment before the little dressmaker's amused eyes.
+
+"Thou art very lovely, very chic," said Monia. The dress added to
+rather than relieved Harmony's discomfiture. She donned it in one
+of the fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining
+off a corner of the large reception room. The slashed skirt
+embarrassed her; the low cut made her shrink. Monia was frankly
+entranced. Above the gold tissue of the bodice rose Harmony's
+exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold; even her eyes looked
+golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave a pull here, a
+pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the things she
+made!
+
+She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind
+the curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit
+more of the girl's rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the
+curtain aside and stood smiling.
+
+Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second's silence.
+Then:--
+
+"Exquisite!" she said in English. Then in halting German: "Do not
+change a line. It is perfect."
+
+Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a
+glimpse of herself and was startled. She had been wearing black
+for so long, and now this radiant golden creature was herself.
+She was enchanted and abashed. The slash in the skirt troubled
+her: her slender leg had a way of revealing itself.
+
+The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered
+another gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the
+dress and into her own shabby frock. On the other side of the
+curtain the dancer was talking. Her voice was loud, but rather
+agreeable. She smoked a cigarette. Scraps of chatter came to
+Harmony, and once a laugh.
+
+"That is too pink--something more delicate."
+
+"Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek."
+
+"I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night."
+
+"Still no news, Fraulein?"
+
+"None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn't so bad, is it? I
+could use more rouge."
+
+"It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child
+could be stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!"
+
+The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became
+nasal, full of venom.
+
+"Oh, they know well enough," she snapped. "Those nurses know, and
+there's a pig of a red-bearded doctor--I'd like to poison him.
+Separating mother and child! I'm going to find him, if only to
+show them they are not so smart after all."
+
+In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her
+curtain, had clutched at her heart. Jimmy's mother!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony's flight had had nothing
+to do with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted
+substitute, and besides Peter had indicated that Harmony's
+absence was purely temporary. But the breaking-up was inevitable.
+All day long the child lay in the white bed, apathetic but
+sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies for his pillow, in
+vain the little mice, now quite tame, played hide-and-seek over
+the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his frantic search
+for Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to him.
+
+He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no
+apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried
+obediently to eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did
+not beg to be taken into the salon, as he once had done. There
+was a sort of mental confusion also. He liked Marie to read his
+father's letters; but as he grew weaker the occasional confusing
+of Peter with his dead father became a fixed idea. Peter was
+Daddy.
+
+Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony's
+adjacent room and dressed there. But he had never slept in the
+bed. At night he put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn
+slippers and lay on a haircloth sofa at the foot of Jimmy's
+bed--lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he that the slender
+thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its slenderest
+during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in every
+night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp
+in his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy's thin
+little chest. Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the
+ears and developed lines about his mouth that never left him
+again. He felt gray and old, and sometimes bitter and hard also.
+The boy's condition could not be helped: it was inevitable,
+hopeless. But the thing that was eating his heart out had been
+unnecessary and cruel.
+
+Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he
+wondered how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he
+hoped it was bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the
+night, when the lamp burned low and gusts of wind shook the old
+house, fearful thoughts came to him--the canal, with its filthy
+depths. Daylight brought reason, however. Harmony had been too
+rational, too sane for such an end.
+
+McLean was Peter's great support in those terrible days. He was
+young and hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to
+grease the machinery of the police service; McLean could and did.
+In Berlin Harmony could not have remained hidden for two days. In
+Vienna, however, it was different. Returns were made to the
+department, but irregularly. An American music student was
+missing. There were thousands of American music students in the
+city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses. McLean offered a
+reward and followed up innumerable music students.
+
+The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became
+old and haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this
+difference, that with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on
+hour, day on day. With McLean each night found him worn and
+exhausted, but each following morning he went to work with
+renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after all, the iron had not
+struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a life-and-death
+matter.
+
+Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for
+work. The little household went on methodically. Marie remained;
+there had seemed nothing else to do. She cooked Peter's
+food--what little he would eat; she nursed Jimmy while Peter was
+out on the long search; and she kept the apartment neat. She was
+never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed, she seemed to have
+lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely to Peter,
+adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in spite
+of his protests.
+
+The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been
+music and Harmony's soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont
+to argue with Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the
+prisms of the chandelier had once vibrated in response to
+Harmony's violin, almost absolute silence now reigned. Even the
+gate, having been repaired, no longer creaked, and the loud
+altercations between the Portier and his wife had been silenced
+out of deference to the sick child.
+
+On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered
+Jimmy's mother in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually
+bad day. McLean had sent him a note by messenger early in the
+morning, to the effect that a young girl answering Harmony's
+description had been seen in the park at Schonbrunn and traced to
+an apartment near by.
+
+Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had
+gone out together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And
+it had been as he feared--a pretty little violin student, indeed,
+who had been washing her hair, and only opened the door an inch
+or two.
+
+McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to
+speak. Then back to the city again.
+
+He had taken to making a daily round, to the master's, to the
+Frau Professor Bergmeister's, along the Graben and the
+Karntnerstrasse, ending up at the Doctors' Club in the faint hope
+of a letter. Wrath still smouldered deep in Peter; he would not
+enter a room at the club if Mrs. Boyer sat within. He had had a
+long hour with Dr. Jennings, and left that cheerful person
+writhing in abasement. And he had held a stormy interview with
+the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for a week, and
+exceedingly nervous, being of the impression from Peter's manner
+that in the event of Harmony not turning up an American gunboat
+would sail up the right arm of the Danube and bombard the Pension
+Schwarz.
+
+Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the
+city in the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean's
+elasticity was deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into
+crowds, had taken on a strained, concentrated look.
+
+Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man's
+ultrafashionable dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms
+dangling between his knees, his head down. Their common trouble
+had drawn the two together, or had drawn McLean close to Peter,
+as if he recognized that there were degrees in grief and that
+Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old rage at Peter
+had died. Harmony's flight had proved the situation as no amount
+of protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the
+girl; then he and Peter would start even, and the battle to the
+best man.
+
+They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since
+he sat down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted
+down from day to day such details of their search as might be
+worth keeping. Now and then he glanced at Peter as if he wished
+to say something, hesitated, fell to work again over the
+notebook. Finally he ventured.
+
+"How's the boy?"
+
+"Not so well to-day. I'm having a couple of men in to see him
+to-night. He doesn't sleep."
+
+"Do you sleep?"
+
+"Not much. He's on my mind, of course."
+
+That and other things, Peter.
+
+"Don't you think--wouldn't it be better to have a nurse. You
+can't go like this all day and be up all night, you know. And
+Marie has him most of the day." McLean, of course, had known
+Marie before. "The boy ought to have a nurse, I think."
+
+"He doesn't move without my hearing him."
+
+"That's an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?"
+
+Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which
+exasperation struggled with fatigue.
+
+"Good Lord, boy," he rasped, "don't you suppose I'd have a nurse
+if I could afford it?"
+
+"Would you let me help? I'd like to do something. I'm a useless
+cub in a sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked
+in the hospital?"
+
+"Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I
+shouldn't let you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but--if
+he would be happier--"
+
+"That's settled, then," said McLean. "Nurse Elisabet, if she can
+come. And--look here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for
+a week and haven't had the nerve. Let me help you out for a
+while. You can send it back when you get it, any time, a year or
+ten years. I'll not miss it."
+
+But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
+
+"I can't take anything now," he said. "But I'll remember it, and
+if things get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to
+live. Marie is a good manager, almost as good as--Harmony was."
+This with difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of
+Harmony. His throat seemed to close on the name.
+
+That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental
+reservation to see Marie that night and slip her a little money.
+Peter need never know, would never notice.
+
+At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian,
+Georgiev, got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came
+in from the platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner.
+Things were not going well with him either. His small black eyes
+darted from face to face suspiciously, until they came to a rest
+on Peter.
+
+It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together
+the bits he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to
+them Peter's despondent attitude, his strained face, the
+abstraction which required a touch on the arm from his companion
+when they reached their destination, recalled Peter outside the
+door of Harmony's room in the Pension Schwarz--and built him a
+little story that was not far from the truth.
+
+Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the
+promenade, when the Ring and the larger business streets were
+full of people, when Demel's was thronged with pretty women
+eating American ices, with military men drinking tea and nibbling
+Austrian pastry, the hour when the flower women along the
+Stephansplatz did a rousing business in roses, when sterile women
+burned candles before the Madonna in the Cathedral, when the
+lottery did the record business of the day.
+
+It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he
+might happen on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always
+as in a crowd, with people close, touching her, men staring at
+her, following her. He had spent a frightful night in the Opera,
+scanning seat after seat, not so much because he hoped to find
+her as because inaction was intolerable.
+
+And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the
+Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He
+even peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping
+while he feared that the girl might be seeking employment within,
+as she had before in the early days of the winter.
+
+Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too,
+because of the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him.
+There was one place where Peter lingered, where a new building
+was being erected, and where because of the narrowness of the
+passage the dense crowd was thinned as it passed. He stood by
+choice outside a hairdresser's window, where a brilliant light
+shone on each face that passed.
+
+Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together
+by the desk spoke of him: "He is there again, the gray man!"
+
+"Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!"
+
+"Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps."
+
+"More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American."
+
+"He is Russian. Look at his size."
+
+"But his shoes!" triumphantly. "They are American, little one."
+
+The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great
+golden rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.
+
+"I think he is of the police," she said, "or a spy. There is much
+talk of war."
+
+"Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have
+such sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white."
+
+"The rose, Fraulein."
+
+The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the
+customer. The customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing
+with strange intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then
+with a curious clutch at her heart she went white. Harmony, of
+course, Harmony come to fetch the golden rose that was to
+complete Le Grande's costume.
+
+She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by
+another exit.
+
+She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could
+see of Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the
+crowd, walking along with her lip trembling under her veil, and
+with the slow and steady ache at her heart that she had thought
+she had stilled for good.
+
+It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had
+proposed to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a
+difficulty for her. And once he had taken her in his arms, but
+that was different. Even then he had not said he loved her--had
+not even known it, to be exact. Nor had Harmony realized what
+Peter meant to her until she had put him out of her life.
+
+The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation,
+so enlightening as to poor Peter's quest, that Peter was growing
+thin and white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied
+with her own position to realize Peter's. With the glimpse of him
+came a great longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for
+Jimmy's arms about her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted
+and the sleet beating harmlessly against the casement windows,
+for the little kitchen with the brick stove, for Peter.
+
+Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back
+meant, at the best, adding to Peter's burden of Jimmy and Marie,
+meant the old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did
+not add to the respectability of the establishment. And other
+doubts assailed her. What if Jimmy were not so well, should die,
+as was possible, and she had not let his mother see him!
+
+Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the
+workroom until eight o'clock. During all that time, while her
+slim fingers worked over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was
+seeing Jimmy as she had seen him last, with the flower fairies on
+his pillow, and Peter, keeping watch over the crowd in the
+Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady eyes for her.
+
+No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she
+knew; the sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather
+worse in places. But the longing to see the house on the
+Siebensternstrasse grew on her, became from an ache a sharp and
+insistent pain. She must go, must see once again the comfortable
+glow of Peter's lamp, the flicker that was the fire.
+
+She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the
+pain. She put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed
+staircase.
+
+The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly
+lighted. She achieved the street, however, without molestation.
+To the street-car was only a block, but during that block she was
+accosted twice. She was white and frightened when she reached the
+car.
+
+The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
+delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a
+light was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little
+shrine over the money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
+
+The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time
+she left the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against
+the dark sky, its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken
+in the center by the gate. Now from across the street its whole
+facade lay before her. Peter's lamp was not lighted, but there
+was a glow of soft firelight from the salon windows. The light
+was not regular--it disappeared at regular intervals, was blotted
+out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some one beyond range of where
+she stood was pacing the floor, back and forward, back and
+forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always paced the
+door.
+
+She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains
+was falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air
+was hardly cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the
+glow died lower and lower, until at last it was impossible to
+trace the pacing figure. No one came to any of the windows. The
+little lamp before the shrine in the wild-game shop burned itself
+out; the Portier across the way came to the door, glanced up at
+the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of the chain as it
+was stretched across the door inside.
+
+Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's
+windows--and Peter's--opened toward the back of the house, where
+in a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her
+washing, and where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A
+wild and reckless desire to see at least the light from the
+child's room possessed Harmony. Even the light would be
+something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of
+a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was
+never locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the
+spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be something.
+
+She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror
+for her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various
+articles on her window-sill and of instigating searches for them
+at untimely hours of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in
+the rabbit hutch! So Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way
+by the big spruce to the corner of the old lodge and thus to the
+courtyard.
+
+Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and
+moving shadows; on Jimmy's window-sill a jar of milk. And
+voices--some one was singing.
+
+Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child
+to sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over,
+the little song Harmony had been wont to sing:--
+
+"Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+Deeply buried from human eyes.
+And in the--hereafter--angels may
+Roll--the--stone--from--its--grave--away."
+
+Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away
+altogether. Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window
+and turned down the gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony
+did not breathe. For a minute, two minutes, he stood there
+looking out. Far off the twin clocks of the Votivkirche struck
+the hour. All about lay the lights of the old city, so very old,
+so wise, so cunning, so cold.
+
+Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went
+away. Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light
+and stood by the window. And each night he whispered to the city
+that sheltered Harmony somewhere, what he had whispered to the
+little sweater coat the night before he went away:--
+
+"Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony."
+
+The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook
+the great tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the
+bricks below. Peter struck a match and lit his pipe; the
+flickering light illuminated his face, his rough hair, his steady
+eyes.
+
+"Good-night, Peter," whispered Harmony. "Good-night, dear."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along
+by relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was
+going about again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before
+because a little less florid. But the week's confinement had
+given him an opportunity to think over many things. Peter had set
+him thinking, on the day when he had packed up the last of
+Marie's small belongings and sent them down to Vienna.
+
+Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. "Just how much talk do
+you suppose this has made, Byrne?" he asked.
+
+"Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa
+saw it, you know."
+
+Stewart's brows contracted.
+
+"Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!"
+
+"Probably."
+
+Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she
+had been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured
+man.
+
+"Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?"
+
+"No," doggedly.
+
+"I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but--you can't get away
+with it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's
+another."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to
+marry, and not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but
+after she gets used to it."
+
+"She wouldn't understand in a thousand years."
+
+"Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an
+idea that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about
+us, anyhow. A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be
+done with it. What a man has done with his life before a
+girl--the right girl--comes into it isn't a personal injury to
+her, since she wasn't a part of his life then. You know what I
+mean. But she has a right to know it before she chooses."
+
+"How many would choose under those circumstances?" he jibed.
+
+Peter smiled. "Quite a few," he said cheerfully. "It's a wrong
+system, of course; but we can get a little truth out of it."
+
+"You can't get away with it" stuck in Stewart's mind for several
+days. It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before
+Stewart had recovered enough to be up and about he had made up
+his mind to tell Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for
+himself; he argued the affair against his conscience and came out
+victorious.
+
+Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare,
+they complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking.
+Into the bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows
+turned soft by midday; and the crowds that began to throng the
+hotels were solid citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera.
+Anita's arm forbade her traveling. In the reassembling of the
+party she went to the Kurhaus in the valley below the pension
+with one of the women who wished to take the baths.
+
+It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first
+excursion after the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the
+chaperon's treatment called for an early retiring hour, which was
+highly as he had wished it and rather unnerving after all. A man
+may decide that a dose of poison is the remedy for all his
+troubles, but he does not approach his hour with any hilarity.
+Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and looked
+haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to
+leave.
+
+He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical
+and mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The
+evening was quiet, and they elected to sit on the balcony outside
+Anita's sitting room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning
+back in her steamer chair.
+
+Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees.
+Beyond and far below that was the mountain village, a few
+scattered houses along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired
+early; light after light was extinguished, until only one in the
+priest's house remained. A train crept out of one tunnel and into
+another, like a glowing worm crawling from burrow to burrow.
+
+The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known
+her there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her.
+There were times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips,
+when his eyes looked into hers with the look no women ever
+mistakes; the next moment he would glance away, his face would
+harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps the situation had
+piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her by its
+unusualness.
+
+To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers
+squarely, without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching,
+perhaps, for something in her to give him courage. The girl had
+character, more than ordinary decision. It was what Stewart
+admired in her most, and the thing, of course, that the little
+Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita, barely twenty, was a woman,
+not a young girl. Her knowledge of the world, not so deep as
+Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would have been
+merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In that
+case she might be less than just, or more.
+
+Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of
+speech, very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming
+to look at, keenly alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony,
+waiting to hear she knew not what, was a judicial white goddess,
+formidably still, frightfully potential. Stewart, who had
+embraced many women, did not dare a finger on her arm.
+
+He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story--a preamble
+about his upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to
+get to Vienna, his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable
+steps to Marie. From that, if she did not utterly shrink from
+him, to his love for her.
+
+It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching,
+through love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But
+as a matter of fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure.
+The situation got him, this first evening absolutely alone with
+her. That and her nearness, and the pathos of her bandaged,
+useless arm. Still he had not touched her.
+
+The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that.
+General credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken
+love first. How many men propose marriage to their women across
+the drawing-room or from chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak
+first, then the arms, the lips last. The woman is in his arms
+before he tells his love. It is by her response that he gauges
+his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the thing is already
+settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct. Stewart,
+wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl's hand, gained an
+encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding
+no rebuff would then and there have crushed her to him; What need
+of words? They would follow in due time, not to make a situation
+but to clarify it.
+
+But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness
+stood between them and must be painfully taken down.
+
+"I'm afraid this is stupid for you," said Anita out of the
+silence. "Would you like to go to the music-room?"
+
+"God forbid. I was thinking."
+
+"Of what?" Encouragement this, surely.
+
+"I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it
+up."
+
+"Really? I?"
+
+"You know that."
+
+"How did I stir it up?"
+
+"That's hardly the way I meant to put it. You've changed
+everything for me. I care for you--a very great deal."
+
+He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he
+did not touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in
+this fashion, or was he making love?
+
+"I'm very glad you like me."
+
+"Like you!" Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice
+was unmistakable. "It's much more than that, Anita, so much more
+that I'm going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help
+a little?"
+
+"Yes, if I can." She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.
+
+Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face
+set and dogged.
+
+"Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?"
+
+"No. There's a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all
+these places, isn't there?"
+
+"This was not an accident."
+
+"No?"
+
+"The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send
+us over the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime."
+
+After a brief silence--
+
+"Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?"
+
+"Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman--a girl, Anita. A
+girl I had been living with."
+
+A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For
+he was quivering with dread when he said it--the courage of the
+man who faces a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would
+have broken into speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and
+was silent. Stewart watched her as best he could in the darkness,
+trying to gather further courage to go on. He could not see her
+face, but her fingers, touching the edge of the chair, quivered.
+
+"May I tell you the rest?"
+
+"I don't think I want to hear it."
+
+"Are you going to condemn me unheard?"
+
+"There isn't anything you can say against the fact?"
+
+But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he
+made his plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what
+had happened simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort.
+And he emphasized the lack of sentiment that prompted the
+arrangement.
+
+Anita spoke then for the first time: "And when you tried to
+terminate it she attempted to kill you!"
+
+"I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then
+neglected her for you."
+
+"Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her."
+
+"It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear
+that, Anita. But lately, in the last month or two, she--I suppose
+I should have seen that she--"
+
+"That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?"
+
+"Nineteen."
+
+A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had
+watched her with wide, almost childish eyes.
+
+"Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train
+coming up?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where is she now?"
+
+"In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came
+up to see me after the--after the accident, sent her away. I
+think he's looking after her. I haven't heard from him."
+
+"Why did you tell me all this?"
+
+"Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me."
+
+"What! After that?"
+
+"That, or something similar, is in many men's lives. They don't
+tell it, that's the difference. I 'm not taking any credit for
+telling you this. I'm ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when
+I look at your bandaged arm I'm suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to
+tell you. He said I couldn't get away with it; some time or other
+it would come out. Then he said something else. He said you'd
+probably understand, and that if you married me it was better to
+start with a clean slate."
+
+No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of
+fact, an offer--his past against hers, his future with hers. Her
+hand was steady now. The light in the priest's house had been
+extinguished. The chill of the mountain night penetrated Anita's
+white furs; and set her--or was it the chill?--to shivering.
+
+"If I had not told you, would you have married me?"
+
+"I think so. I'll be honest, too. Yes."
+
+"I am the same man you would have married. Only--more honest."
+
+"I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold."
+
+Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas
+hugged the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside
+was the little balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing
+and looked down, down. Some of the arrogance of his new virtue
+left the man. He was suddenly humbled. For the first time he
+realized a part of what Marie had endured in that small room
+where the light burned.
+
+"Poor little Marie!" he said softly.
+
+The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he
+could have made. Anita rose and held out her hand.
+
+"Go and see her," she said quietly. "You owe her that. We'll be
+leaving here in a day or so and I'll not see you again. But
+you've been honest, and I will be honest, too. I--I cared a great
+deal, too."
+
+"And this has killed it?"
+
+"I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think."
+
+"But if you are going away--I'm afraid to leave you. You'll think
+this thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you've been
+taught will come--"
+
+"Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise."
+
+He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.
+
+"I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?" humbly.
+
+"I do not want you to kiss me."
+
+He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the
+darkness. If he could only have crushed her to him, made her feel
+the security of his love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier
+of his own building was between them. His voice was husky.
+
+"I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the
+thing that concerns us both--I love you. I never loved the other
+woman. I never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing
+more like that."
+
+"I shall try to remember."
+
+Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the
+doctor and the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart
+again. But before she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre
+at the door, she went out on the terrace, and looked across to
+the Villa Waldheim, rising from among its clustering trees.
+Although it was too far to be certain, she thought she saw the
+figure of a man on the little balcony standing with folded arms,
+gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.
+
+Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his
+promise in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of
+the following day, for Vienna. The strain of the confession was
+over, but he was a victim of sickening dread. To one thing only
+he dared to pin his hopes. Anita had said she cared, cared a
+great deal. And, after all, what else mattered? The story had
+been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of queer ideas of
+right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!
+
+He arrived in Vienna at nine o'clock that night. The imminence of
+his interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a
+hurried supper, and calling up the Doctors' Club by telephone
+found Peter's address in the Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea,
+of course, that Marie was there. He wanted to see Peter to learn
+where Marie had taken refuge, and incidentally to get from Peter
+a fresh supply of moral courage for the interview. For he needed
+courage. In vain on the journey down had he clothed himself in
+armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment in the
+train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a
+luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this
+station she had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a
+nap. Ah, but again, at this part of the journey he had first seen
+Anita!
+
+He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter's
+manner of living those days was exceedingly vague. He had
+respected Peter's reticence, after the manner of men with each
+other. Peter had once mentioned a boy he was looking after, in
+excuse for leaving so soon after the accident. That was all.
+
+The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted.
+The street was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart
+found the gate. Even then he lost the path, and found himself
+among a group of trees, to touch the lowest branches of any of
+which resulted in a shower of raindrops. To add to his discomfort
+some one was walking in the garden, coming toward him with light,
+almost stealthy steps.
+
+Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached,
+were very close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness
+that even then all he saw was a blacker shadow, and that was
+visible only because it moved. Then a hand touched his arm,
+stopped as if paralyzed, drew back slowly, fearfully.
+
+"Good Heavens!" said poor Harmony faintly.
+
+"Please don't be alarmed. I have lost the path." Stewart's voice
+was almost equally nervous. "Is it to the right or the left?"
+
+It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:--
+
+"To the right a dozen paces or so."
+
+"Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it."
+
+"I know it quite well. Please don't bother."
+
+The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn
+on Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking
+God's own language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance,
+they made the path.
+
+"The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order."
+
+"Are you not coming in?"
+
+"No. I--I do not live here."
+
+She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark
+facade of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment
+later heard the closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort
+of curious place was this, a great looming house that concealed
+in its garden a fugitive American girl who came and went like a
+shadow, leaving only the memory of a sweet voice strained with
+fright?
+
+Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the
+Portier gave him and followed the gentleman's gruff directions up
+the staircase. Peter admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as
+well he might with Marie in the salon.
+
+Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter's expression. He
+shook the rain off his hat, smiling.
+
+"How are you?" asked Peter dutifully.
+
+"Pretty good, except for a headache when I'm tired. What sort of
+a place have you got here anyhow, Byrne?"
+
+"Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa," replied Peter, still
+preoccupied with Marie and what was coming. "Rather interesting
+old place."
+
+"Rather," commented Stewart, "with goddesses in the garden and
+all the usual stunts."
+
+"Goddesses?"
+
+"Ran into one just now among the trees. 'A woman I forswore, but
+thou being a goddess I forswore not thee.' English-speaking
+goddess, by George!"
+
+Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and
+grasped his arm in fingers of steel.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in
+the garden?"
+
+Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle
+a situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.
+
+"I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke
+through a hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the
+compass--"
+
+Peter's fingers closed.
+
+"Quick," he said.
+
+Stewart's manner lost its jauntiness.
+
+"There was a girl there," he said shortly. "Couldn't see her. She
+spoke English. Said she didn't live here, and broke for the gate
+the minute I got to the path."
+
+"You didn't see her?"
+
+"No. Nice voice, though. Young."
+
+The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was
+running down the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to
+the Portier to unlock the door, was a madman in everything but
+purpose. The Portier let him out and returned to the bedroom.
+
+"The boy above is worse," he said briefly. "A strange doctor has
+just come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug
+store."
+
+The Portier's wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled
+her eyes.
+
+"What can one expect?" she demanded. "The good Herr Gott has
+forbidden theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the
+druggist has gone to visit his wife's mother."
+
+"Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up."
+
+"And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I
+shall go."
+
+Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.
+
+Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found
+Peter's excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived,
+an old house, isolated in a garden where rambled young women with
+soft voices. Hello, a youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.
+
+He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie.
+The place was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the
+indescribable odor of drugs that meant illness. He remembered
+that the boy was frail.
+
+Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose,
+white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each
+other. Marie's crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger
+than speech. It was after a distinct pause that she spoke.
+
+"Hast thou brought the police?"
+
+Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart's
+mental condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it
+was with tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And
+yet--
+
+"So it's old Peter now, is it?"
+
+"No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all.
+I swear it. I look after the boy."
+
+"Who else is here?"
+
+"No one else; but--"
+
+"Tell that rot to some one who does not know you."
+
+"It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not
+lie." There was a  catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men
+somewhat, but she still cherished the feminine belief that
+jealousy is love, whereas it is only injured pride. She took a
+step toward him. "Walter, I am sorry. Do you hate me?" She had
+dropped the familiar "thou."
+
+Stewart crossed the room until only Peter's table and lamp stood
+between them.
+
+"I didn't mean to be brutal," he said, rather largely, entirely
+conscious of his own magnanimity. "It was pretty bad up there and
+I know it. I don't hate you, of course. That's hardly possible
+after--everything."
+
+"You--would take me back?"
+
+"No. It's over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that's
+all; to see that you were comfortable and not frightened. You're
+a silly child to think of the police."
+
+Marie put a hand to her throat.
+
+"It is the American, of course."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. "Then I
+wish I had killed her!"
+
+No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman
+for her rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation
+in hand and Marie only feebly formidable, was rather amused and
+flattered by the honest fury in her voice. The mouse was under
+his paw; he would play a bit. "You'll get over feeling that way,
+kid. You don't really love me."
+
+"You were my God, that is all."
+
+"Will you let me help you--money, I mean?"
+
+"Keep it for her."
+
+"Peter will be here in a minute." He bent over the table and eyed
+her with his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. "Come round
+here and kiss me for old times."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Come."
+
+She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a
+step or two toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew
+himself up.
+
+"You are quite right and I'm a rotter." Marie's English did not
+comprehend "rotter," but she knew the tone. "Listen, Marie, I've
+told the other girl, and there's a chance for me, anyhow. Some
+day she may marry me. She asked me to see you."
+
+"I do not wish her pity."
+
+"You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say,
+without a dot. There is a chance in America for a clever girl.
+You are clever, little Marie. The first money I can spare I'll
+send you--if you'll take it. It's all I can do."
+
+This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled
+from him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an
+explanation. When at last she understood that he was sincere, she
+broke down. Stewart, playing a new part and raw in it, found the
+situation irritating. But Marie's tears were not entirely bitter.
+Back of them her busy young mind was weaving a new warp of life,
+with all of America for its loom. Hope that had died lived again.
+Before her already lay that great country where women might labor
+and live by the fruit of their labor, where her tawdry past would
+be buried in the center of distant Europe. New life beckoned to
+the little Marie that night in the old salon of Maria Theresa,
+beckoned to her as it called to Stewart, opportunity to one, love
+and work to the other. To America!
+
+"I will go," she said at last simply. "And I will not trouble you
+there."
+
+"Good!" Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick
+gesture she held it to her cheek, dropped it.
+
+Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He
+had not found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well,
+still in Vienna, and--she had come back! She had cared then
+enough to come back. To-morrow he would commence again, would
+comb the city fine, and when he had found her he would bring her
+back, the wanderer, to a marvelous welcome.
+
+He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few
+belongings by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still
+stained with tears but radiant with hope.
+
+"Peter," she said gravely, "I must prepare my outfit. I go to
+America."
+
+"With Stewart?"
+
+"Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am
+very happy, although--Peter, may I kiss you?"
+
+"Certainly," said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her
+thin shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who
+had cared enough to come back.
+
+"Life," said Peter soberly, "life is just one damned thing after
+another, isn't it?"
+
+But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.
+
+The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She
+said:--
+
+"I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt
+you very much--but not, believe me, without hurting myself.
+Perhaps my uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing
+you, that I am not so big as you thought I would be. For now, in
+this final letter, I can tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear,
+I did care!
+
+"But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have
+gone very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy
+as I have does not support me to-night, that all my little rules
+of life are inadequate. Individual liberty was one--but there is
+no liberty of the individual. Life--other lives--press too
+closely. You, living your life as seemed best and easiest, and
+carrying down with you into shipwreck the little Marie
+and--myself!
+
+"For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It
+is not only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady
+revolt and loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest
+before one succumbs to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred
+that is a part of me and that would never forget.
+
+"You say that you are the same man I would have married, only
+more honest for concealing nothing. But--and forgive me this, it
+insists on coming up in my mind--were you honest, really? You
+told me, and it took courage, but wasn't it partly fear? What
+motive is unmixed? Honesty--and fear, Walter. You were preparing
+against a contingency, although you may not admit this to
+yourself.
+
+"I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am
+only trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break
+is final. The revolt is in myself, against something sordid and
+horrible which I will not take into my life. And for that reason
+time will make no difference.
+
+"I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great
+deal of this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter--home and
+children, the love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals.
+And you ask me to start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know
+you are resentful, but--I know that you understand.
+
+"ANITA."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine
+was threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with
+Bulgaria sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing
+troops, and there were long conferences in the Burg between the
+Emperor and various bearded gentlemen, while the military prayed
+in the churches for war.
+
+The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on
+all day in the small room below Harmony's on the Wollbadgasse. At
+night, when the man in the green velours hat took a little sleep,
+mysterious packages were carried down the whitewashed staircase
+and loaded into wagons waiting below. Once on her window-sill
+Harmony found among the pigeons a carrier pigeon with a brass
+tube fastened to its leg.
+
+On the morning after Harmony's flight from the garden in the
+Street of Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She
+had put in a sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She
+charged herself with cowardice in running away from Peter and
+Jimmy when they needed her, and in going back like a thief the
+night before. The conviction that the boy was not so well brought
+with it additional introspection--her sacrifice seemed useless,
+almost childish. She had fled because two men thought it
+necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and she
+did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had
+promised herself, had been promised. But this career, for which
+she had given up everything else--would she find it in the
+workroom of a dressmaker?
+
+Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose--how her cheeks
+burned when she thought of it!--suppose she had taken Peter at
+his word and married him? What about Peter's career? Was there
+any way by which Peter's poverty for one would be comfort for
+two? Was there any reason why Peter, with his splendid ability,
+should settle down to the hack-work of general practice, the very
+slough out of which he had so painfully climbed?
+
+Either of two things--go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or
+stay where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew.
+There in the little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held
+out her arms longingly. "Peter!" she said. "Peter, dear!"
+
+She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no
+one. The instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at
+any cost outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard
+and tired, looking out. It was Harmony's chance, perhaps, to do a
+big thing; to prove herself bigger than her fears, stronger than
+convention. But she was young, bewildered, afraid. And there was
+this element, stronger than any of the others--Peter had never
+told her he loved her. To go back, throwing herself again on his
+mercy, was unthinkable. On his love--that was different. But what
+if he did not love her? He had been good to her; but then Peter
+was good to every one.
+
+There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his
+mother? Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose
+he were to die and his mother not see him? Harmony's sense of
+fairness rebelled. In the small community at home mother was
+sacred, her claims insistent.
+
+It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on
+the sill; over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous
+strip foretold the sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the
+market, lumbered along the streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony
+rose and lighted her fire, drew on her slippers and the faded
+silk kimono with the pink butterflies.
+
+In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early
+morning dreams of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining
+customers.
+
+Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in
+order, fed the pigeons,--it was then she saw the carrier with its
+message,--made her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside
+the stove. And all the time, moving quietly through her morning
+routine, she was there in that upper room in body only.
+
+In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in
+the Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the
+hutch, and Peter, with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed,
+toilet-table, coffee-pot, Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise
+over the church roof, and Peter again. Always Peter!
+
+Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear
+her, muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the
+Hungarian maid for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one
+of her new duties to prepare the workroom for the day. The
+luminous streak above the church was rose now, time for the day
+to begin.
+
+She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the
+door, so faint was the sound.
+
+She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony,
+expecting Monia, called "Come in."
+
+It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face.
+He stood in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear
+toward the stairway. It was very silent. Monia was drinking her
+coffee in bed, whither she had retired for warmth.
+
+"Pardon!" said the Bulgarian in a whisper. "I listened until I
+heard you moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!"
+
+"Something has happened!" exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter,
+of course.
+
+"Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor
+to open your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I
+fear--on the sill, Fraulein."
+
+Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once,
+but the carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and
+set about its breakfast.
+
+"Will he let me catch him?"
+
+"Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter--"
+
+"Come in, of course."
+
+Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A
+handful of grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown!
+Georgiev caught the pigeon and drew the message from the tube.
+Even Harmony grasped the seriousness of the situation. The little
+Bulgarian's face, from gray became livid; tiny beads of cold
+sweat came out on his forehead.
+
+"What have I done?" cried Harmony. "Oh, what have I done? If I
+had known about the pigeon--"
+
+Georgiev recovered himself. 
+
+"The Fraulein can do nothing wrong," he said. "It is a matter of
+an hour's delay, that is all. It may not be too late."
+
+Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee.
+The sulky Hungarian brought it without a glance in their
+direction.
+
+"Too late for what?"
+
+"Fraulein, if I may trouble you--but glance from the window to
+the street below. It is of an urgency, or I--Please, Fraulein!"
+
+Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev,
+behind her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in
+her head.
+
+"Only a man in a green hat," she said. "And down the street a
+group of soldiers."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.
+
+"They are coming for you?"
+
+"It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna." 
+
+"And I with the pigeon--Oh, it's too horrible! Herr Georgiev,
+stay here in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is
+mine--"
+
+"Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the
+pigeon. It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but
+a matter of--imprisonment."
+
+"There must be something I can do," desperately. "I hear them
+below. Is there no way to the roof, no escape?"
+
+"None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a
+man of peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank
+you."
+
+"You are not going down!"
+
+"Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces
+mostly, and not for a lady to confront."
+
+"They are coming up!"
+
+He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
+unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his
+chest, turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.
+
+His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.
+
+"Fraulein," he said huskily, "you are very lovely. I carry always
+in my heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu."
+
+He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone
+down the staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She
+collapsed in a heap on the floor of her room, her fingers in her
+ears. But she need not have feared. The little Georgiev made no
+protest, submitted to the inevitable like a gentleman and a
+soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as unobtrusively as he had
+entered it.
+
+The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
+washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and
+pondered what was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so
+incredibly brief are great moments. After a little thought
+Harmony wrote a tiny message, English, German, and French, and
+inclosed it in the brass tube.
+
+"The Herr Georgiev has been arrested," she wrote. An hour later
+the carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way
+over the church roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her
+life. Grim-visaged war had touched her and passed on.
+
+The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the
+building followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting
+tenants were turned out, beds were dismantled, closets searched,
+walls sounded for hidden hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor
+was found stored a quantity of ammunition.
+
+It was when the three men who had conducted the search had
+finished, when the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the
+hall, and the chattering sewing-girls had gone back to work, that
+Harmony, on her way to her dismantled room, passed through the
+upper passage.
+
+She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so
+manfully descended.
+
+"I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I
+live."
+
+The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to
+her ears; the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of
+sewing-machines from the workroom. The incident was closed,
+except for the heap of ammunition boxes on the landing, guarded
+by an impassive soldier.
+
+Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in,
+heels in, toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.
+
+"You!" she said.
+
+The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, "Yea, yea,"
+and "Nay, nay."
+
+"Yes, Fraulein."
+
+Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal,
+infinitely touching.
+
+"You will not say that you have found, have seen me?"
+
+"No, Fraulein."
+
+It was in Harmony's mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to
+learn--of Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that
+belonged to the old life in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was
+no time. The sentry's impassive face became rigid; he looked
+through her, not at her. Harmony turned.
+
+The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was
+no further chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the
+boxes down the staircase.
+
+Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in
+the market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in
+the Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony's golden head as she bent
+over a bit of chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the
+whitewashed staircase her heavy cans of milk; on the carrier
+pigeon winging its way to the south; beating in through bars to
+the exalted face of Herr Georgiev; resting on Peter's drooping
+shoulders, on the neglected mice and the wooden soldier, on the
+closed eyes of a sick child--the worshiped sun, peering
+forth--the golden window of the East.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All
+through the night he had felt it; during the hours before the
+dawn there had been times when the small pulse wavered,
+flickered, almost ceased. With the daylight there had been a
+trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of hope, enough to make
+harder Peter's acceptance of the inevitable.
+
+The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he
+opened his eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face,
+smiled back. Peter died many deaths that night.
+
+At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor.
+Marie, creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy
+apparently asleep and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He
+raised his head at her footstep and the girl was startled at the
+suffering in his face. He motioned her back.
+
+"But you must have a little sleep, Peter."
+
+"No. I'll stay until--Go back to bed. It is very early."
+
+Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet,
+and now it was useless. At eight o'clock he let Marie take his
+place, then he bathed and dressed and prepared to face another
+day, perhaps another night. For the child's release came slowly.
+He tried to eat breakfast, but managed only a cup of coffee.
+
+Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was
+insistent--the boy's mother was in Vienna and he was dying
+without her. Peter might know in his heart that he had done the
+best thing for the child, but like Harmony his early training was
+rising now to accuse him. He had separated mother and child. Who
+was he to have decided the mother's unfitness, to have played
+destiny? How lightly he had taken the lives of others in his
+hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where; the boy dying
+without his mother. Whatever that mother might be, her place that
+day was with her boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He was
+humbled as well as stricken, poor Peter!
+
+In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to
+trace the mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the
+letter. The letter, signed only "Mamma," was not helpful. The
+clipping might prove valuable.
+
+"And for Heaven's sake be quick," wrote Peter. "This is a matter
+of hours. I meant well, but I've done a terrible thing. Bring
+her, Mac, no matter what she is or where you find her."    The
+Portier carried the note. When he came up to get it he brought in
+his pocket a small rabbit and a lettuce leaf. Never before had
+the combination failed to arouse and amuse the boy. He carried
+the rabbit down again sorrowfully. "He saw it not," he reported
+sadly to his wife. "Be off to the church while I deliver this
+letter. And this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in
+remembrance."
+
+At eleven o'clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the
+horsehair sofa.
+
+"He asks for you."
+
+Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy's eyes were
+open and fixed on him.
+
+"Is it another day?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, boy; another morning."
+
+"I am cold, Peter."
+
+They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay
+he could see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter,
+very humble, found himself wondering in how many ways he had been
+remiss. To see this small soul launched into eternity without a
+foreword, without a bit of light for the journey! Peter's
+religion had been one of life and living, not of creed.
+
+Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.
+
+"He knows, poor little one!" she whispered.
+
+And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or
+two of broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter,
+opening the cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The
+catastrophe he kept from the boy.
+
+"One is sick, Jimmy boy," he said, and placed the mate, forlorn
+and shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:--
+
+"If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?"
+
+"Yes, honey, I think so."
+
+The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech.
+His mind too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay
+there with closed eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under
+his long lashes. Peter bent over and wiped them away, a great
+ache in his heart.
+
+"What is it, dear?"
+
+"I'm afraid--it's going to die!"
+
+"Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?" asked Peter gently. "To
+go to heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is
+always summer and the sun always shines?"
+
+No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and
+rubbed its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage
+nuzzled their dead mother.
+
+"Is there grass?"
+
+"Yes--soft green grass."
+
+"Do--boys in heaven--go in their bare feet?" Ah, small mind and
+heart, so terrified and yet so curious!
+
+"Indeed, yes." And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter
+painted such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity
+to paint--a heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing
+children, a heaven of dear departed puppies and resurrected
+birds, of friendly deer, of trees in fruit, of speckled fish in
+bright rivers. Painted his heaven with smiling eyes and death in
+his heart, a child's heaven of games and friendly Indians, of
+sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.
+
+The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech
+was increasingly an effort.
+
+"I should--like--to go there," he whispered at last.
+
+He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at
+dusk he roused again.
+
+"I would like--to see--the sentry," he said with difficulty.
+
+And so again, and for the last time, Rosa's soldier from Salzburg
+with one lung.
+
+Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work,
+unaccustomed muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears.
+Monia, upset over the morning's excitement, was irritable and
+unreasonable. The gold-tissue costume had come back from Le
+Grande with a complaint. Below in the courtyard all day curious
+groups stood gaping up the staircase, where the morning had seen
+such occurrences.
+
+At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in
+pails of salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen
+into the way of playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese
+girls this was the hour of the day. To sit back, soup bowl on
+knee, the machines silent, Monia quarreling in the kitchen with
+the Hungarian servant, and while the pigeons ate crusts on the
+window-sills, to hear this American girl play such music as was
+played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her whole beautiful
+face and body glowing with the melody she made, the girls found
+the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she did
+not suspect it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the
+workroom. She was not of the people, they said--the daughter of a
+great American, of course, run away to escape a loveless
+marriage. This was borne out by the report of one of them who had
+glimpsed the silk petticoat. It was rumored also that she wore no
+chemise, but instead an infinitely coquettish series of lace and
+nainsook garments--of a fineness!
+
+Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not
+played since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to
+Peter as she had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little
+Georgiev as he went down the staircase. And finally with a choke
+in her throat to the little mother back home, so hopeful, so
+ignorant.
+
+In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of
+the day at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd
+and coming back quickly through the winter night. The staircase
+was always a peril, to be encountered and conquered night after
+night and even in the daytime not to be lightly regarded. On her
+way up this night she heard steps ahead, heavy, measured steps
+that climbed steadily without pauses. For an instant Harmony
+thought it sounded like Peter's step and she went dizzy.
+
+But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had
+stood that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels
+in, toes out, chest out, was the sentry.
+
+Harmony's first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the
+building. Then she saw that the sentry's impassive face wore
+lines of trouble. He saluted. "Please, Fraulein."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I have not told the Herr Doktor."
+
+"I thank you."
+
+"But the child dies."
+
+"Jimmy?"
+
+"He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps,
+but of moments."
+
+Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. "You are
+sure? You are not telling me so that I will go back?"
+
+"He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours.
+My wife, Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and
+her cousin, the wife of the Portier, weeps over the stove.
+Please, Fraulein, come with me."
+
+"When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?"
+
+"But now."
+
+"And he still lives?"
+
+"Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you."
+
+Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all
+that was personal and small and frightened, before the reality of
+death. She rose, as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis;
+ceased trembling, got her hat and coat and her shabby gloves and
+joined the sentry again. Another moment's delay--to secure the Le
+Grande's address from Monia. Then out into the night, Harmony to
+the Siebensternstrasse, the tall soldier to find the dancer at
+her hotel, or failing that, at the Ronacher Music-Hall.
+
+Harmony took a taxicab--nothing must be spared now--bribed the
+chauffeur to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across
+the garden, still tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper
+flight, and rang the bell.
+
+Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was
+nothing to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in
+hand, alone, drear, tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw
+Harmony and went white, holding to the back of his chair. Their
+eyes met, agony and hope in them, love and death, rapture and
+bitterness. In Harmony's, pleading, promise, something of doubt;
+in Peter's, only yearning, as of empty arms. Then Harmony dared
+to look at the bed and fell on her knees in a storm of grief
+beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her hair.
+
+Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the
+immense theater waiters scurried back and forward among the
+tables. Everywhere was the clatter of silver and steel on
+porcelain, the clink of glasses. Smoke was everywhere--pipes,
+cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between bites at the tables,
+using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a gold one shone
+here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners, spraying
+the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the
+stage sat the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph.
+They were drinking cheap native wines and were very happy.
+
+From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the
+people to her.
+
+"In the box--don't stare, Liebchen, he looks--is the princeling I
+have told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids."
+
+"Last night! Were you here?" He coughed.
+
+"I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when
+she finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and
+tosses them to her."
+
+"Shameless! Is she so beautiful?"
+
+"No. But you shall see. She comes."
+
+Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the
+program; and because she sang in American, which is not exactly
+English and more difficult to understand, her songs were
+considered exceedingly risque. As a matter of fact they were
+merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to them that caught the
+Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentinental ditties and the
+artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another reason for
+her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen
+pickaninnies.
+
+In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats!
+So the little chorus had made good.
+
+Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and
+behind her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in
+red-velvet coats and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a
+pair sat on the boot.
+
+Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing
+against dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by
+cigarettes and absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled
+their American prototypes as the night resembles the day.
+
+She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
+rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve
+little darkies.
+
+She sang "Dixie," of course, and the "Old Folks at Home"; then a
+ragtime medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and
+clogging with all their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a
+whirling, nimble dance. The little rhinestones on her stockings
+flashed; her opulent bosom quivered. The Dozent, eyes on the
+dancer, squeezed his companion's hand.
+
+"I love thee!" he whispered, rather flushed.
+
+And then she sang "Doan ye cry, mah honey." Her voice, rather
+coarse but melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing
+and lilt of the lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling,
+preternaturally solemn, linked arms and swayed rhythmically,
+right, left, right, left. The glasses ceased clinking; sturdy
+citizens forgot their steak and beer for a moment and listened,
+knife and fork poised. Under the table the Dozent's hand pressed
+its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer on Le Grande, but
+on the woman across, his sweetheart, she who would be mother of
+his children. The words meant little to the audience; the rich,
+rolling Southern lullaby held them rapt:--
+
+"Doan ye Cry, mah honey-- 
+Doan ye weep no mo', 
+Mammy's gwine to hold her baby,
+All de udder black trash sleepin' on the flo',"
+
+The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.
+
+She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against
+her breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The
+crowd applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung
+them. Glasses and dishes clinked again.
+
+The Dozent bent across the table.
+
+"Some day--" he said.
+
+The girl blushed.
+
+Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little
+troupe. A motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off,
+rounded them up like a flock of chickens.
+
+And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier
+of the old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room.
+For a moment gold dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted
+each other. Then the sentry touched his cap.
+
+"Madam," he said, "the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and
+to-night he dies."
+
+"What child?" Her arms were full of flowers.
+
+"The child from the hospital. Please to make haste."
+
+Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with
+one hand in Harmony's and one between Peter's two big ones.
+
+Toward the last he called Peter "Daddy" and asked for a drink.
+His eyes, moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the
+grayfaced woman in a gold dress who stood staring down at him,
+rested a moment on the cage of mice, came to a stop in the
+doorway, where stood the sentry, white and weary, but refusing
+rest.
+
+It was Harmony who divined the child's unspoken wish.
+
+"The manual?" she whispered.
+
+The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across
+from the old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but
+no lack of vigor, went again through the Austrian manual of arms,
+and because he had no carbine he used Peter's old walking-stick.
+
+When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay
+still.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony
+he loved her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had
+about given out, and there was no way to get more save by earning
+it. The drain of Jimmy's illness, the inevitable expense of the
+small grave and the tiny stone Peter had insisted on buying, had
+made retreat his only course. True, Le Grande had wished to
+defray all expenses, but Peter was inexorable. No money earned as
+the dancer earned hers should purchase peaceful rest for the
+loved little body. And after seeing Peter's eyes the dancer had
+not insisted.
+
+A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference
+between Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart
+raised the money somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and
+eager, with the pin he had sent her to Semmering at her throat.
+She kissed Peter on the cheek in the station, rather to his
+embarrassment. From the lowered window, as the train pulled out,
+she waved a moist handkerchief.
+
+"I shall be very good," she promised him. The last words he heard
+above the grinding of the train were her cheery: "To America!"
+
+Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food
+where he might happen to be, buying a little now and then from
+the delicatessen shop across the street. For Harmony had gone
+back to the house in the Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all
+was over and until Marie's small preparations for departure were
+over. Then, while Peter was at the station, she slipped away
+again. But this time she left her address. She wrote:--
+
+"You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely
+before and that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I
+cannot stay in the Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight
+to make, and you have been trying to fight for us all, for Marie,
+for dear little Jimmy, for me. You must get back to work now; you
+have lost so much time. And I am managing well. The Frau
+Professor is back and will take an evening lesson, and soon I
+shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can see how things
+are looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to renew
+my music lessons. And then, Peter,--the career!
+
+"HARMONY."
+
+Her address was beneath.
+
+Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood
+with the letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He
+could offer her nothing but his shabby self, his problematic
+future. Perhaps, surely, everything would have been settled,
+without reason, had he only once taken the girl in his arms, told
+her she was the breath of life itself to him. But adversity,
+while it had roused his fighting spirit in everything else, had
+sapped his confidence.
+
+He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found
+himself confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a
+tired, lined face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with
+a sick child's head against its breast.
+
+So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time
+he must let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry
+herself on to success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and
+ability. And she had proved the thing he had not dared to
+believe, that she could take care of herself in the old city.
+Only--to go away and leave her there!
+
+McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in
+the Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he
+had seen during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony's
+every word, every gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard
+work began to tell on her, McLean's devotion would win its
+reward. McLean's devotion, with all that it meant, the lessons
+again, community of taste, their common youth! Peter felt old,
+very tired.
+
+Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his
+gray suit to the Portier's wife to be pressed, and getting out
+his surgical case, as he had once before in the Pension Schwarz,
+he sewed a button on his overcoat, using the curved needle and
+the catgut and working with surgeon's precision. Then, still
+working very carefully, he trimmed the edges of graying hair over
+his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best silk tie, now
+almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not coming,
+he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy's room to feed
+the mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with
+his face working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside
+table.
+
+It was in Peter's mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his
+defeat and approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them.
+Then he decided against this palpable appeal for sympathy,
+elected to go empty-handed and discover merely how comfortable
+she was or was not. When the time came he would slip out of her
+life, sending her a letter and leaving McLean on guard.
+
+Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase--where
+Harmony had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down
+to his death--climbed steadily, but without his usual elasticity.
+The place appalled him--its gloom, its dinginess, its somber
+quiet. In the daylight, with the pigeons on the sills and the
+morning sunlight printing the cross of the church steeple on the
+whitewashed wall, it was peaceful, cloisterlike, with landings
+that were crypts. But at night it was almost terrifying, that
+staircase.
+
+Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper
+landing, playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He
+waited outside before ringing, heard her begin something
+determinedly cheerful, falter, cease altogether. Peter rang.
+
+Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps--oh, certainly she had
+expected him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how
+she was getting on, how she was housed. She held out her hand and
+Peter took it. Still no words, only a half smile from her and no
+smile at all from Peter, but his heart in his eyes.
+
+"I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room."
+
+"You knew I would come," said Peter. "The reception room?"
+
+"Where customers wait." She still carried her violin, and slipped
+back to her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its
+poverty and its meagerness. He drew a long breath.
+
+Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen
+knitting a stocking. The reception room was warm from the day's
+fire, and in order. All the pins and scraps of the day had been
+swept up, and the portieres that made fitting-rooms of the
+corners were pushed back. Peter saw only a big room with empty
+corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were Harmony's.
+
+He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet
+settee. They were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first
+time. In the squalor of the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable
+intimacies of the Street of Seven Stars, they had been easy,
+unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was tongue-tied. Only one thing
+in him clamored for utterance, and that he sternly silenced.
+
+"I--I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?"
+
+"No. Of course, I understood."
+
+"You were not angry?"
+
+"Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I
+needed you. Only, of course,--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I'll not say that, I think."
+
+"Please say it, Peter!"
+
+Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.
+
+"Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me,
+only--"
+
+"Only--I always need you!" Peter, Peter!
+
+"Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs
+a woman; but--"
+
+"Well, of course--but--I'm generally in trouble, Harry dear."
+
+Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of
+his weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by
+stooping for a neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had
+stuck it in his lapel he had saved his mental forces from the
+rout of Harmony's eyes.
+
+His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most
+delectable look in the aforesaid eyes.
+
+"I didn't come to be silly," he said to the table. "I hate people
+who whine, and I've got into a damnable habit of being sorry for
+myself! It's to laugh, isn't it, a great, hulking carcass like
+me, to be--"
+
+"Peter," said Harmony softly, "aren't you going to look at me?"
+
+"I'm afraid."
+
+"That's cowardice. And I've fixed my hair a new way. Do you like
+it?"
+
+"Splendid," said Peter to the center table.
+
+"You didn't look!"
+
+The rout of Harmony's eyes was supplemented by the rout of
+Harmony's hair. Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony
+was half exasperated; she would have boxed Peter's ears with a
+tender hand had she dared.
+
+His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced
+her at last.
+
+"First of all," he said, "I am going back to America, Harmony.
+I've got all I can get here, all I came for--" He stopped, seeing
+her face. "Well, of course, that's not true, I haven't. But I'm
+going back, anyhow. You needn't look so stricken: I haven't lost
+my chance. I'll come back sometime again and finish, when I've
+earned enough to do it."
+
+"You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money
+on others, and now you are going back just where you were,
+and--you are leaving me here alone!"
+
+"You are alone, anyhow," said Peter, "making your own way and
+getting along. And McLean will be here."
+
+"Are you turning me over to him?"
+
+No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.
+
+"Peter!"
+
+"Yes, dear?"
+
+"Do you remember the night in Anna's room at the Schwartz when
+you proposed to me?"
+
+No reply. Peter found another pin.
+
+"And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?"
+
+Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young
+figure, her luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.
+
+"Peter, I want you to--to ask me again."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Now, listen to me, Harmony. You're sorry for me, that's all; I
+don't want to be pitied. You stay here and work. You'll do big
+things. I had a talk with the master while I was searching for
+you, and he says you can do anything. But he looked at me--and a
+sight I was with worry and fright--and he warned me off, Harmony.
+He says you must not marry."
+
+"Old pig!" said Harmony. "I will marry if I please."
+
+Nevertheless Peter's refusal and the master's speech had told
+somewhat. She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood
+close, looking down at her.
+
+"I've said a lot I didn't mean to," he said. "There's only one
+thing I haven't said, I oughtn't to say it, dear. I'm not going
+to marry you--I won't have such a thing on my conscience. But it
+doesn't hurt a woman to know that a man loves her. I love you,
+dear. You're my heaven and my earth--even my God, I'm afraid. But
+I will not marry you."
+
+"Not even if I ask you to?"
+
+"Not even then, dear. To share my struggle--"
+
+"I see," slowly. "It is to be a struggle?"
+
+"A hard fight, Harmony. I'm a pauper practically."
+
+"And what am I?"
+
+"Two poverties don't make a wealth, even of happiness," said
+Peter steadily. "In the time to come, when you would think of
+what you might have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me,
+dear."
+
+"People have married, women have married and carried on their
+work, too, Peter."
+
+"Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of
+man, Harry. I'm jealous--jealous of every one about you. It would
+have to be the music or me."
+
+"And you make the choice!" said Harmony proudly. "Very well,
+Peter, I shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious
+sort of love."
+
+"I wonder," Peter cried, "if you realize what love it is that
+loves you enough to give you up."
+
+"You have not asked me if I care, Peter."
+
+Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very
+beautiful.
+
+"I'm afraid to ask," said Peter, and picking up his hat he made
+for the door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.
+
+"My sweetest heart!" he cried, and took her in his hungry arms.
+But even then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her
+slender body held to him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to
+her soft throat, Peter put her from him as a starving man might
+put away food.
+
+He held her off and looked at her.
+
+"I'm a fool and a weakling," he said gravely. "I love you so much
+that I would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my
+girl! As long as I live I shall carry your image in my heart."
+
+Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death
+that waited down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her
+again, put away her detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went
+to the door.
+
+"Good-bye, Harmony," he said steadily. "Always in my heart!"
+
+Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America,
+with the recording angel opening a new page in life's ledger for
+her and a red-ink line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his
+daddy wandering through the heaven of friendly adventure and
+green fields, hand in hand; with the carrier resting after its
+labors in the pigeon house by the rose-fields of Sofia; with the
+sentry casting martial shadows through the barred windows of the
+hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to die, dividing his
+heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young girl.
+
+Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining
+into the salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter's open trunk and
+shabby wardrobe spread over chairs. An end of trunks and
+departure, as was the beginning.
+
+Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God's acre, whence little
+Jimmy had started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on
+the frost-covered grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle
+of the Donau. Harmony had taken her problem there, in the early
+hour before Monia would summon her to labor--took her problem and
+found her answer.
+
+The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too
+warmly clad, walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper
+against the cold. Already the air carried a hint of spring; there
+was a feeling of resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt
+alive under-foot.
+
+Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child
+had repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it,
+with some vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the
+little verse:--
+
+"Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies
+Deeply buried from human eyes:
+And in the hereafter, angels may
+Roll the stone from its grave away."
+
+When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.
+
+There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great
+bunch of roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence
+they came. One of the pickaninnies had carried the box and stood
+impassively by, gazing at Harmony.
+
+Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered
+it, quite eclipsed Harmony's.
+
+"I come here every morning," she said simply.
+
+She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the
+city. Her quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked
+once into the woman's eyes. After that she knew. It was on the
+drive back, with the little darky on the box beside the driver,
+that Harmony got her answer.
+
+Le Grande put a hand over Harmony's.
+
+"I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him."
+
+"We loved him."
+
+"And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right--I was not a fit
+person to--to have him."
+
+"It was not that--not only that--"
+
+"Did he ever ask for me? But of course not."
+
+"No, he had no remembrance."
+
+Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.
+
+"I loved him very much when he came," said Le Grande, "although I
+did not want him. I had been told I could have a career on the
+stage. Ah, my dear, I chose the career--and look at me! What have
+I? A grave in the cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by
+a man I loathe! If I could live it over again!"
+
+The answer was very close now:--
+
+"Would you stay at home?"
+
+"Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the
+boy always. There is only one thing worth while--the love of a
+good man. I have lived, lived hard. And I know."
+
+"But supposing that one has real ability--I mean some achievement
+already, and a promise--"
+
+Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.
+
+"I see. You are a musician, I believe?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And--it is Dr. Byrne?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Le Grande bent forward earnestly.
+
+"My child," she said, "if one man in all the world looked at me
+as your doctor looks at you, I--I would be a better woman."
+
+"And my music?"
+
+"Play for your children, as you played for my little boy."
+
+Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting
+clean collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like
+negligible garments with great care and putting in his dresscoat
+in a roll. His pipes took time, and the wooden sentry he packed
+with great care and a bit of healthy emotion. Once or twice he
+came across trifles of Harmony's, and he put them carefully
+aside--the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief, a bow she had
+worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before and
+that reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get
+away if he is to keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon
+bow can bring that look of suffering into his eyes.
+
+The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot,
+any foot at all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.
+
+"Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen," he sang at the top
+of his voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the
+air. The antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in
+his bedroom. When the wildgame seller came over for coffee there
+would be a discussion probably. But were not the antlers of all
+deer similar?
+
+The Portier's wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her
+hand.
+
+"A cab," she announced, "with a devil's imp on the box. Perhaps
+it is that American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!"
+
+It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache.
+Harmony was at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week
+before or the undecided and troubled girl of before that. A
+radiant Harmony, this, who stood in the doorway, who wished them
+good-morning, and ran up the old staircase with glowing eyes and
+a heart that leaped and throbbed. A woman now, this Harmony, one
+who had looked on life and learned; one who had chosen her fate 
+and was running to meet it; one who feared only death, not life
+or anything that life could offer.
+
+The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up--not dressed.
+What did that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?
+
+Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney's Point, had come across
+a bit of paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his
+open trunk, staring blindly at it:--
+
+"You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.
+
+"H. W."
+
+Quite the end now, with Harmony running across the room and
+dropping down on her knees among a riot of garments--down on her
+knees, with one arm round Peter's neck, drawing his tired head
+lower until she could kiss him.
+
+"Oh, Peter, Peter, dear!" she cried. "I'll love you all my life
+if only you'll love me, and  never, never let me go!" 
+
+Peter was dazed at first. He put his arms about her rather
+unsteadily, because he had given her up and had expected to go
+through the rest of life empty of arm and heart. And when one has
+one's arms set, as one may say, for loneliness and relinquishment
+it is rather difficult--Ah, but Peter got the way of it swiftly.
+
+"Always," he said incoherently; "forever the two of us. Whatever
+comes, Harmony?"
+
+"Whatever comes."
+
+"And you'll not be sorry?"
+
+"Not if you love me."
+
+Peter kissed her on the eyes very solemnly.
+
+"God helping me, I'll be good to you always. And I'll always love
+you."
+
+He tried to hold her away from him for a moment after that, to
+tell her what she was doing, what she was giving up. She would
+not be reasoned with.
+
+"I love you," was her answer to every line. And it was no divided
+allegiance she promised him. "Career? I shall have a career.
+Yours!"
+
+"And your music?"
+
+She colored, held him closer.
+
+"Some day," she whispered, "I shall tell you about that."
+
+Late winter morning in Vienna, with the school-children hurrying
+home, the Alserstrasse alive with humanity--soldiers and
+chimney-sweeps, housewives and beggars. Before the hospital the
+crowd lines up along the curb; the head waiter from the
+coffee-house across comes to the doorway and looks out. The
+sentry in front of the hospital ceases pacing and stands at
+attention.
+
+In the street a small procession comes at the double quick--a
+handful of troopers, a black van with tiny, high-barred windows,
+more troopers.
+
+Inside the van a Bulgarian spy going out to death--a swarthy
+little man with black eyes and short, thick hands, going out like
+a gentleman and a soldier to meet the God of patriots and lovers.
+
+The sentry, who was only a soldier from Salzburg with one lung,
+was also a gentleman and a patriot. He uncovered his head.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Street of Seven Stars by Rinehart
+
diff --git a/old/old/sstrs10.zip b/old/old/sstrs10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ddf453
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/sstrs10.zip